


knock me the fuck out (i dare ya, babe)

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: run long, roam far, return soon [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Have a Good Relationship, Cute Steve Harrington, Doing inappropriate things in public, El ships it, M/M, Max ships it, Robin is such a smartass, Robin ships it, Soft Billy Hargrove, Teacher Steve Harrington
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:14:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21568996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: "What's your teacher's name?""He's Mister H!"
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Series: run long, roam far, return soon [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612147
Comments: 140
Kudos: 832





	1. Chapter 1

Billy’s first thought as he rolls back into Hawkins for the first time in ten years is: _I cannot believe Max stayed in this deathtrap_. 

_He_ didn’t. Ten years, eight months, three weeks, and nine days ago, Billy had escaped this Lovecraftian nightmare town and never looked back. As soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital, he spent most of his savings on a shitty Ford Bronco (he did NOT miss that car), packed up his records, and hit the fuckin’ road. He’d come into Hawkins believing that it was his own personal hell and left it certain that it was actual, literal Hell.

Billy wonders, a bit guiltily, if Max’s life woulda turned out like this if he hadn’t left her in this Midwestern madhouse all by herself. Only twenty-four and she was already getting a divorce. 

He’s never like Justin van Haut but at first, Billy attributed that to the fact that the dude was dating Max - he had a right to hate any dude trying to fuck his sister, he figured. Facts was just facts. But then they got married and it didn’t get better. If anything, Billy might’ve hated him more. 

Justin reminded Billy way too fucking much of himself, of the strutting arrogant little dirtbag that he used to be - only, van Haut had the money and the influence to get away with his bad deeds. He was the kind of guy who wanted something only until he got it, and then he didn’t want it anymore. 

Billy wasn’t that person anymore. He couldn’t be. It took too much energy that he didn’t have - like the Shadow Monster had sucked all the rage out of him. And without it, there was so little left of Billy Hargrove.

Old Billy would’ve gotten drunk and drove to South Bend. Old Billy would’ve beat the shit outta the bitch-ass pussy who’d spent six and half years cheating on his sister. Old Billy would’ve spent the night in the county lock-up. 

New Billy didn’t do that, because New Billy promised Max he’d be there by dinner time. New Billy knew that Max would just have to bail his sorry ass out of prison with money she didn’t really have. 

But either way, Billy knew even if he had the chance to, he’d never change the way it worked out, because in the end-

“UNCLE BILLY!”

-in the end, he got his girl.

As soon as he opens the door, she launches herself at him. “Who is this?” he demands seriously, stabilizing her on his lap, letting her grip the stirring wheel in two tiny hands. “Who are you? Where’s my Lulu?”

She giggles at his theatrics, tugging at his leather jacket, wisps of red hair escaping her little braid. “ _I’m_ Lulu, Uncle Billy!”

He gasps, feigning shock. “You can’t be my Lulu! You’re such a big girl!”

“I’m going to Kindie-gar-den now!” she says proudly, with a cocky little toss of her head that reminded Billy of her mother so much that he couldn’t hold in a grin.

“Yeah? Do you like school, Lulu?” They get out so that Billy can grab some of his things from the trunk.

“Uh-huh. My teacher is really nice!”

“Yeah? What’s your teacher’s name?” he asks absently, resting Lulu on his hip as he pulls his bag from the trunk.

“He’s Mister H!” she says, and his brows bounce up. Male kindergarten teacher? That was pretty unusual. Maybe Hawkins was finally getting outta the Stone Age. He doubts it, but hope springs eternal.

From inside the house, Max yells “Lauren!”

“Mommy, Uncle Billy is here!” she shouts, and squirms back down to the ground, running for the front porch. “Mommy says you can have my room!”

Billy thinks with no small horror of the pink room with Mickey and Minnie Mouse’s faces staring out from the wallpaper. Jesus Christ. Lulu beams at him, utterly delighted at the prospect of her uncle moving in, and he barely has to lie when he says “Fantastic, princess.”

Max gives him a wry smile as she appears in the doorway, practically reading his mind as she wipes her wet hands on a dishtowel. “Welcome home, big brother.”

Old Billy would’ve told her that this town might be home, but it wasn’t his. Home was a place he lost when his mother left him with Neil. New Billy knows Max isn’t talking about Hawkins. “You’re gonna get so sick of me,” he promises, dropping the paper bag he’d taken from the trunk. “Here.”

“What the hell is this?” she asks, laughing. “You better not’ve brought me a bag of p- oh my god, **_Billy_**.”

He chuckles at her open-mouth as Max stares down into the stacks of cash inside the crumbled paper bag. Rubbing the short hair at the back of his neck, he awkwardly answers, “Rent.”

“This is way too much!” she protests, trying to hand it back, like she didn’t miss a mortgage payment last month.

Billy dances out of the way, picking Lulu up and twirling her around. Grinning like a madman at her delighted shrieks, he throws her across one shoulder. “Wanna help me set up the stereo, Lulu?”

“Yeah!”

“Billy, get back here!”

“Can’t hear you, Max! All that loud metal music, y’know!”

\---

“I’m home!” he calls, pushing the door shut with his hip. The apartment is completely silent and then Steve hears a familiar ‘thump’ and grins.

With her bushy tail held high, a black cat races down the hall, wailing “Waah!”

“Hello, Angie,” he coos, crouching to scratch her under the chin. “How are the birds today, huh?”

“Waah,” she repeats loudly, pleading at him with her huge yellow eyes.

“Missed me?” he asks, stroking the fluffy black fur along her back. “Let’s have some dinner.”

He must’ve told Dustin a thousand, maybe two thousand, times that he _did not want_ a cat, but the very morning that Dustin left for MIT, he dropped the fluffy soot-black kitten on Steve’s doorstep and raced away anyway. “His name is ‘the Witch-King of Angmar’, good luck, Steve!”

Ha. The joke was on him, though. His ‘Witch-King’ was actually a queen and Steve called her Angie and she was a fucking delight – he suspected that Dustin was just overly dramatic. Steve supposed that the cat was a nice compromise, considering that Dustin had tried not to leave for college at all.

 _That_ had probably been the worst six months of Steve’s life.

He’d never fought with one of the kids before, let alone Dustin, but they spent nearly all of his senior year fighting – because Dustin managed to get a scholarship, a two-year free ride to Princeton, and he didn’t want to leave Hawkins. Or more specifically, he didn’t want to leave Steve.

Lucas was bound for Howard in DC, Will and Mike were reuniting at MIT, and Dustin got into fucking Princeton, but he _didn’t want to go_.

(“What the fuck are you talking about, _you don’t wanna go_? I don’t give two dicks what you want, shithead. I’m an adult, Dustin, and I can take care of myself! You’re not going to throw your whole life into the toilet because you think I’m _LONELY_!”)

So, yeah. Steve and Dustin spent Dustin’s senior year of high school fighting, and now Steve has a cat and Dustin is in _graduate school_ , because college was where he fucking _belonged_ , just like Steve had told him.

Filling Angie’s bowl, Steve idly dances around the kitchen to no music, pulling open the fridge and peering inside. “What should we have for dinner, Angie? What do ya think Aunt Robin wants to eat?”

Angie doesn’t bother turning her head away from her cat kibble, but her tail swishes at the sound of his voice. Humming ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, Steve throws together a stir-fry.

Cooking has become one of those parts of being an adult that Steve finds unexpectedly pleasurable. Cutting up the ingredients, mixing spices and seasonings, tending to the food – Steve enjoys that.

He hears jingling in the hallway as Robin comes through the door, purse swinging from her arm. He can also hear her swearing under her breath and she kicks her shoes off onto the mat beside the door. “Angie, Angie baby,” she coos as the cat runs to greet her. “Please feed me, Steve-o. I’m gonna fucking kill Bobby Monroe.”

“Parent-teacher conference didn’t go well?” he asks lightly, fluffing the rice with a fork before he pulled his stir-fry off the fire.

“NO,” she says shortly, before calling “How was the dentist? Is this a bad time to say that I picked up a banana cream pie at Baker’s Square?”

In a rather bloodthirsty tone, Steve replies “Cavity or no cavity, we are eating dessert, Rob.”

“Okay, okay, you don’t have to get out a torch and a pitchfork.”

“What happened with Bobby Monroe?”

Oof, speaking of bloodthirsty. Robin’s teeth grind together and Steve pokes her pointedly in the side as he takes their plates down from the cabinet. “His kid is on the verge of going to juvie and this guy just…Does Not get it, Steve.”

Steve’s glasses were on the verge of slipping down the bridge of his nose as he cracked open the tops on two beers. “That’s ‘cause Monroe is golfing buddies with Mayor Walsh and my old pal Tommy Hall, Rob.”

Her nose wrinkles. “Ugh,” she mutters, then brightens a bit. “I got to read another one of Holly’s essays.”

Smiling at his plate, Steve says “Yeah?”

He was a little sad he got into teaching too late to have Holly or any of the other kids as a student, but Robin got the joy of having both Erica Sinclair and Holly Wheeler pass through her classroom. “Her analysis of the creation of the Constitution was…I wanna send it to Harvard, Steve. She’s only fifteen, but she can already understand how to translate nuance in the document. Half of my graduating class couldn’t write something that impressive on early US history.”

“That’s fantastic,” he says, grinning.

“How was Munchkin Land?” she asks, through a mouthful of vegetables and rice.

Laughing slightly, Steve says “The Lollipop Guild always keeps me on my toes. Thank god for naptime!”

They eat banana cream pie on the couch in front of ‘Frasier’, Robin’s toes shoved under his thigh as Steve tries not to fall asleep on the damn sofa. She laughs at him, throwing one of the cushions at his face.

“It’s seven-thirty, you old man,” she teases, coaxing Angie onto her lap.

“Leave me alone,” he whines, melting into his secondhand couch. “I’m an educator of young minds!”

Rob stuck her tongue out at time. “It’s called ‘narcolepsy’, Steven.”

“Please leave me to die in peace.”

She does leave, an hour later, and Steve locks the door behind her like a Responsible Adult.

He is surrounded by almost total silence again. He’s a helluva lot more comfortable with it here in his apartment than he was in his parent’s house. Maybe it was because there wasn’t quite so much space to echo the silence back to him. Maybe it was because there was no steaming blue pool waiting in the backyard. Maybe it was the lack of judgmental silence, which persisted whether his parents were home or away. 

He turns off the television and the lights in the living room, babbling baby-talk at Angie as he brushes his teeth and gets into bed, putting his glasses on the nightstand and sliding between the cool sheets.

Angie curls up behind his knees and Steve closes his eyes and listens to the empty space all around him.

Briefly, he spares a thought of apology for the Dustin of years past, because he’d been right. Steve _was_ lonely. But at least now that he was a real grown-up, he was comfortable with it.

Mostly.

\---

“You don’t have to do that,” Max mutters, head resting against the back of the sofa. Lauren was put to bed an hour ago and the only sound down in the house in the constant quiet tick of the grandfather clock in the hall.

“Hm?” Billy asks sleepily, sipping his beer. It was a thirty hour drive between San Diego and Hawkins and Billy had only slept once, and not recently. Honestly, that was probably the best state to experience the Horror of the Mouse that awaited him in Lulu’s old room.

Max gestures restlessly to the stacks of hundred dollar bills hastily stuffed into the paper bag. “Don’t pretend that isn’t your entire savings, Billy.”

“Don’t _have_ to anything but die, Max,” he murmurs, his free hand subconsciously drifting to the tight silvery mass of scarring beneath his shirt, even as his eyes remain closed. With a damp shaky sigh, she leans against his side and Billy shifts that hand to drape around her shoulders. “Don’t fuckin’ argue with me, you know I ain’t gonna let you win.”

His t-shirt gets a little wet. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she admits, sniffling. “I missed you.”

His throat clicks as he swallows. “Missed you, Mad Max.”

Though Billy’s exhausted and goes to bed early, he spends an hour in Lulu’s full-sized bed, flat on his back and staring at the ceiling.

Despite his best-laid plans, here he is. Back in Hawkins, Indiana.

Funny that he still kinda feels like a mess, even though he’s a better mess than he used to be.

When his alarm goes off, Billy has the taste of antifreeze in his mouth and though it’s nearly March and Max keeps the heat low, he’s sweating.

Getting Lulu ready for school is a breeze. Firstly, because she’s smart and independent and she knows the routine she’s supposed to be following by now. Second, because once you fight an interdimensional alien monster and temporarily die, not much phases you anymore.

“This one, Uncle Billy!” Lulu says eagerly, pulling him along through the halls, towing her uncle with single-minded determination. "You can meet Sam and Freddy!"

Samantha Cross and Fred Ferris were Lulu's little friends. "Alright, slow down, you're gonna run someone over," he says, amused. She reminds him so much of Max, it's insane. "This one, Lulu?"

"Yeah!" A dark-haired man wearing a navy cardigan over a collared shirt is helping a pair of identical twins with their coats, crouching near a row of cubbies with sixteen name tags on them – from here, Billy can see Lulu’s near the end: Lauren V. "Hi, Mister H!"

Mister H-who-wears-the-dorky-cardigan turns his head and the bottom of Billy’s stomach drops out.

Steve Harrington gives Lulu a dorky little smile, all cute and happy, squinting from behind the lens of his big nerd glasses, and warmly says “Hello, Lauren.”

As a teenage boy, rolling fresh into Hawkins, Billy had fallen into a wild spiral of lust for Steve Harrington the moment he saw him standing next to Nancy Wheeler at a Halloween party. Closeted and angry and unable to escape his father’s rage and his father’s expectations, all Billy wanted was some of Steve’s attention – he hadn’t dared to let himself seriously consider getting more than that. Steve, being a straight teenage boy with a girlfriend, with popularity and money, had froze him out at every turn, and it drove Old Billy fucking crazy. No matter what he did, he never got a reaction more interested than bland annoyance. 

As hot as his passions for him burned, Billy couldn’t make the Hawkins ice princess melt even a little.

But at a certain point, when you grow up, you can look on certain things you got attached to or certain things you enjoyed as a teenager and find your attachment sort of silly, maybe even comical. New Billy had sort of looked forward to reaching that conclusion here.

This isn’t like that at all.

Actually, Billy thinks it might even be _worse_ than before. Billy feels a dull flush beginning to form over his face and swallows the urge to say something stupid to get Steve’s attention – that was the ghost of Old Billy talking.

God, he looks _so_ good.

All grown up, the knitwear clinging to the tantalizing hint of strong biceps, Steve’s eyes are huge and dark behind the lenses of the geek glasses, bangs hanging down into his eyes. Beneath the cardigan, his collared shirt shows an enticing view of his clavicles and the moles high on his neck. Billy used to jerk off to a fantasy of sucking on them and seeing what kind of noise he would get.

He looks soft and sleepy, like Billy could just curl himself around him and press his mouth to that bare skin and Steve would just-

“This is my Uncle Billy!”

Billy is abruptly pulled from his thoughts by the sound of Lulu’s voice and realizes that he’s well on his way to pitching a tent in his pants in front of Steve Harrington and his five year old niece. What the fuck is his life, seriously?

“Harrington.”

\---

“Harrington,” the man next to Lauren drawls, and suddenly, Steve’s attention is focused and sharp.

 _This is my Uncle Billy_.

He’s…wow, he’s really…grown up.

The sneering boy with a headful of dirty blond curls and a baby-fine mustache has aged into a grown man with a full beard – the old mullet has almost reversed, with the hair at the back and sides nearly shaved off and the hair at the top slicked back away from his face.

 _Oh my god_.

So. So so so so so.

The thing about Billy- “Hargrove,” he greets, hoping that he sounds friendly and surprised and not breathless. “Max didn’t tell me you were coming back to town.” 

Billy Hargrove was the very first boy Steve was ever attracted to, and after he left town, the realization that 1) he had a big gay crush on him and 2) he wasn’t ever going to see him again, were sorta the things that began his big bisexual breakdown – what Robin affectionately calls Steve’s ‘all dicks tour of ‘86’, even though she still doesn’t know what started it.

And now Billy’s standing here, in Steve’s classroom, the muscles he used to flash now hidden beneath leather and denim and flannel but possessing every inch of them as much as he had ten years ago. He looks like he could toss Steve over his shoulder and carry him off somewhere, like a caveman.

But hotter, Steve thinks, helplessly staring at the long sweep of his lashes. His lips, the same deep, full red of ripened berries. The dusting of freckles over Billy’s cheeks from hours standing in the sun.

For a moment, Steve feels a stab of uncertain fear – has Max ever told Billy anything about what happened in ’86?

No. His relationship with Max may have gotten slightly distant, especially after she officially married Justin, but he was pretty confident that she wouldn’t have told him such embarrassing and personal information about Steve, not when she that knew Billy had _hated_ him.

At least she seems to be right, though – Billy had calmed down a lot.

Billy shrugs, in that effortless, careless way of his. Steve experiences a visceral urge to have that short beard rub his mouth raw and it makes his stomach twist with desire, uncomfortable in its intensity. “Got tired of San Diego – thought I’d see my best girl. Right, Lulu?”

 _Lulu_. God, that’s cute.

Lauren grins up at Billy, proud as a peacock, and Billy smiles back at her for a moment, so nakedly adoring that Steve’s stomach gives another twist, his insides melting into goo. “Billy lives with me and Mommy now, ‘cause he missed me so much,” she declares, lifting her chin. “I’m his best girl.”

“That’s right,” he vows, cuffing her lightly over the head.

“That’s…really nice of you, Hargrove,” Steve says lightly. He knows that Max is getting a divorce – the entire town knows. Honestly if he didn’t think Max would kick him in the nuts, he’d have a nail bat with Justin’s name on it. 

Lucas, chewing on his jealousy like a wad of bubblegum, had told them that Justin had basically spent their entire relationship cheating on her. He’d gotten the most willful girl in school to be his girlfriend and got bored with her almost immediately afterward. 

He has a feeling that was the real reason for Billy’s sudden appearance in town after ten years of absence.

Billy shrugs again and peers at Steve through those long lashes. “Max didn’t tell me you were Lulu’s teacher.” He grins, tongue held between rows of sharp white teeth. Steve’s heart kicks up in his chest. “Kindergarteners, Harrington?”

He smiles awkwardly, dodging the question. “Lauren is one of my best readers,” he says instead. No matter which child it is, Steve can always find a reason to brag about one of his kids. “And her penmanship is terrific.”

Lauren gasps, bouncing with excitement, one of Billy’s rough hands clutched in both of hers. “I read a chapter book with Mommy and she only had to help me with two words, Mister H!”

“That’s awesome!” he says, unable to keep himself from beaming down at her. “Did Mrs. Diaz help you get a library card?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Maybe your uncle can help you, then,” he says brightly, neatly side-stepping anymore conversation with the boy – the man, _god_ , Steve didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone more of a man – who can apparently still make his heart race, even ten years since he’d last saw him.

In the doorway, he spots Marcy Roberts holding her little brother’s hand. “Morning Marcy. And good morning, Martin.”

“Morning, Mr. Harrington!”

\---

“Alright, Lulu, it’s almost time for your class to start,” Billy says, tucking her too-long bangs behind her ears. “Mom will be back to pick you up, okay?”

For the first time, some of Lulu’s uncertainty shows through. “You’re still gonna be here, right? You aren’t going home?”

Billy pauses. Fuck, this kid’s dad has done a number on her.

Justin was hardly ever around anyway, but he’d just packed up and left in the middle of the night – Billy doesn’t even know the last time he bothered to talk to her on the phone. Lulu’s gotten upset when she and Max had to say goodbye to Billy in the past, but she’s never acted this insecure with him. “I’m home now, Lulu,” he says, crouching down to press a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll be there to say goodnight, okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees in a tiny voice that steals his whole fuckin’ heart away.

“Who’s my girl?” he asks in a whisper, tugging gently on the end of her ponytail.

Her face brightens. “I am.”

“The best, Lulu.” He winks and she giggles. “Be good, okay?”

“Kay!”

He stands to his full height and Harrington’s eyes accidentally meet his. There’s still a small smile lingering around the soft shape of his mouth and as soon as he looks into those big brown eyes, Steve looks away. Billy bites the inside of his cheek, resists his automatic urge to say something spiteful, something that will get those eyes back on him.

He would like to be able say that it’s because New Billy knows better. But it’s really because he already knows from experience that it won’t do anything but make Steve that much colder. He wants fire, and all that’s there for him is ice.

He leans against the wall right outside the classroom door and…just listens.

Listens to Steve speaking, his sweet patient drawl used for the children in his classroom. “Alright let’s take attendance and then I want to hear all about what you did this weekend, class. Evan Adams?” He stays there, listening with eyes closed, until he hears, “Lauren van Haut?”

“Here!”

Billy shakes himself, pushing away from the wall. No sense mooning over a straight boy who thinks he’s lower than dirt.


	2. Chapter 2

Angie is left to wail around the living room with increasingly frustrated hunger, because Steve needs to spend the first thirty minutes after he comes home screaming into a pillow.

Had Billy seen him staring?

He was so sweet with Lauren, so gentle to her that Steve couldn’t help his smiling, but he’d seen the annoyed expression on Billy’s face from the corner of his eye when he’d turned away. Could he tell that Steve had been checking him out earlier? Maybe he just didn’t want to call him out in front of Lauren and the other children? Maybe he loathed Steve just as much as ever did?

Steve hugs a pillow to his stomach and rests his cheek atop it, feeling glum. _Figures_. Figures that the first boy he’d ever been attracted to would roll back into town ten years later (looking finer than any person has a right to!), while Steve spends his days with children and his nights alone.

He can’t even get a girlfriend anymore – after the big bisexual breakdown, no girl in Hawkins will date him, but he wished he had a boyfriend or at least a hookup he could call.

Robin gets dates, but he concedes that it’s probably easier when the entire town doesn’t know you’re a queer.

He can’t date any woman within ten miles of the town – even if she somehow doesn’t already know the whole stupid story yet, someone will happily and gleefully open their mouth to enlighten her. And no man will date him either, because agreeing to that is basically agreeing to let the whole town know who you are. There’d be no hiding it.

Flopping his face back down into the pillow, Steve screams some more, before jumping off the couch with a sudden burst of motion. No, no. He promised himself, he promised Robin, he promised _Dustin_ , that he wasn’t going to make himself feel bad about this anymore. The past was the past, and he couldn’t change it.

So what if his dad never spoke to him and his mom only called twice a year? That was about the amount of contact they used to have! So what if the parents tried to stop him from being hired? They hadn’t been able to succeed and Steve got the job of his dreams anyway! So what if he still had a crush on Billy Hargrove? He’d survived it the first time and he’d survive it again.

God knows he’s survived worse.

“Uh, Steve-o?” Robin asks, looking around the kitchen. “Wanna tell me what happened to you today?”

“What do you mean?” Steve responds absently, without looking up from the pan of mushrooms on the stove.

“Steve, you’re making beef wellington, honey,” she says carefully, as though making Steve aware of this might make him explode or something. “I mean, please don’t stop, because your beef wellington is fucking amazing – but you also only make it when you feel like shit. So. Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

He stares down at the pan. “Did you know that Billy Hargrove was back in town?”

“Billy – Max’s brother, Billy?” Robin asks. Steve could almost feel her bristling. “He didn’t start threatening you again, did he?”

“No, Max was right,” he says, in the soft stilted tone that tells her he’s actually very upset. “He’s much calmer now.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “Then you need to tell me why you look like someone killed Angie in front of you.”

Woodenly, he replies “Remember how I said I had a crush on a straight boy, back in ’86, when all the shit was going down?”

“ _Oh my god_ , **Steve** -”

“But he wouldn’t give me the time of day, unless it involved his fist and my face? Billy was that boy. Is that boy. Man. Whatever.”

“Steve,” Robin says seriously, grabbing onto his forearms and holding her eyes open wide as she tries not to laugh. “Billy isn’t any straighter than I am.”

\---

After leaving Lulu with _Steve fucking Harrington_ , holy shit, Billy feels the urgent need for a cigarette as soon as he leaves the school parking lot. He fishes for a lighter before whispering “Fuck” because of course he can’t smoke in the fucking car anymore, Lulu rides in this car with him now.

Cursing, Billy pounds on the steering wheel and pulls over to furiously smoke a cigarette outside, standing on the side of the road because Steve was _there_ , and how the fuck has he gotten even prettier in the last ten years?, and Billy wanted to fuck him on that desk so bad something was wrong with him, and Steve’s smile for the person Billy loved most in the world was absolutely _devastating_.

Easy as that blinding smile, Billy could feel the old ghosts of his yearning – if not laid to rest, then at least peaceful in their haunting – live and howl again.

Getting back into the driver’s seat involves a whole new chorus of swearing, but he needs to get into work, mental breakdown or not. The bell over the shop jingles as he steps inside, accompanied by the intoxicating smell of sugar, flour, and vanilla.

The woman standing behind the counter of the bakery display finally manages to break his bad mood and he cracks a smile for her. “Hey, Trouble.”

Eleven leans over the counter, palms flat on the glass, her curls pinned to the back of her head. There’s flour smudged across her face and raspberry jam on her apron. “Who, me?”

He hugs her over the counter and kisses her flour-dusted cheek. “Yeah, you topple any major government conspiracies lately?”

Loftily, El says “I like to take the winters off.”

“Is that right?” he drawls, turning the hand-washing station onto hot after hanging up his jacket. “Then I’m just in time.”

She stares at him from her spot leaning against the pastries display, chin resting on her small fist. “Yes, you are,” she says in that eerie tone that means she isn’t talking about herself anymore. “Welcome home, Billy.”

Drying off his hands, Billy says “How come you ain’t tell me how bad things had gotten with her, huh?”

El stands straight, arms protectively folded over herself. “She was already mad at me for…the whole…”

She waves her hand around ambiguously, but Billy correctly interprets that as ‘spilling the beans on that asshole she married’. “She ain’t mad at you,” he soothes. “She’s mad at herself.”

When Eleven still looks unconvinced, he adds, “Don’t tell her I said so, but I know she misses you. Misses all of the nerd herd.”

“We may not be together anymore, but we miss her too,” she says sadly.

Billy’s gaze sharpened upon her. “You tellin’ me Wheeler just left you out here in this backwoods town all by yourself?”

She shrugs. “We grew up. He wanted to go to MIT and I didn’t want to follow him.”

He wants to tell her that Mike Wheeler was insane to leave her, but honestly, staying in Indiana for a teenage girl and giving up MIT was way more insane.

El nods. “Yeah, that’s what I told him.”

He glares at her. “No peaking, Ellie.”

She lifts her hands in surrender. “Stop thinking at me so loud, then.”

 _Steve, Steve, Steve – has she seen about Steve_? El’s eyes widen. _Shit. SHIT. **SHIT**_.

“Uh..” She chews at her bottom lip.

“We are not talking about this,” he informs her flatly, pushing the door to the back room open. “You’re gonna pretend you didn’t…hear…see…whatever.”

“Billy…” she says hesitantly.

“What I literally _just_ say?” he demands.

“Yes, okay, but…” Her eyes search his expression intently. “Um…Max didn’t tell you what happened during Spring Break in ’86, did she?”

He swore he was ‘bout to get whiplash from this girl. “Noooo,” he says, drawn out. “Why? What happened back in ’86?”

“Um…” El’s face turns red and she scratches nervously at the nape of her neck. “Steve, um…oh, never mind! Ask Max if you want to know.”

\---

“What do you mean, Billy’s not straight?!” Steve demands, practically standing on the kitchen counter as he yells the question at her.

Robin is still trying very hard not to laugh. “Uh, okay…how do I put this…I want you to look back on your memory of Billy Hargrove when we were in high school, Steve. Think really, really hard. Did you ever actually see him kissing a girl? Dating any girls, back in school? Can you name a single girl he dated?”

“Everybody knew he was a total horndog,” Steve scoffs, feeling that old belated jealousy rear its ugly head.

“No, I don’t care about what _everyone_ knew. What did you _see_ , Steve? Remember the way Billy dressed?”

He rolls his eyes. “He was from California, Rob.”

“I visited Disneyland when I was sixteen. I did not see _anyone_ in California dressed like that. He wore eyeliner _and curled his hair_ , Steve. And if I’m remembering this correctly, that boy flashed his tits like he was starring in his own fucking porn video.” She smirks at his steadily reddening cheeks. “Your boy? Is _gay_ , Steve-o.”

Robin pauses and squints a moment, as though staring at something in the distance. “Wait, Billy was a lifeguard that summer, right? Red shorts, came into Scoops and ordered…”

“Double strawberry,” Steve mutters, feeling bitchy and depressed.

“Oh my god.” This time, Robin couldn’t hold the laughter in.

“What?” he asks, annoyed. “I mean, I know the mustache wasn’t really working for him back then, but you should see-”

“No-no-no,” she cackles, holding her sides. “Oh my god, boys are so dumb. Steve-Steve, back then? Billy wanted to choke on your dick real bad.”

He stares at her blankly.

“ _Real bad_ , Steve.”

“What are you even talking ab-no! No!” Steve snaps. “Billy _hated_ me! He beat my face in and tormented me from the moment he stepped into town, Rob!”

It’s Robin’s turn to scoff. “You’ve never heard about that trite old adage about boys who pull on little girls’ pigtails, Steve? Except that his little girl was another boy – a boy who already had a girlfriend when he got into town.”

“No way,” Steve snaps.

“And he wants this boy’s attention really, really bad, Steve. But this boy had just got his heart broken and didn’t know he also liked boys, yet. Billy’s boy won’t give him the attention he wants and he’s got a lot of anger management and self-control issues. We see that in the classroom every day, Steve. What do you think Billy would do?”

“That’s a pretty picture you’re painting,” Steve says flatly, rolling their wellington into its blanket of puff pastry. “I have a much simpler explanation – Billy was an egomaniac who thought I was at the head of the Hawkins food chain and decided that he was going to be the new apex predator and humiliated me to accomplish that. Him being gay or not doesn’t factor into it.”

Robin pours them both a glass of red – she’ll have to drink a lot of water if she doesn’t want a headache, but she needs it tonight. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal,” she says airily. “I bet you a full year of grading tests that Billy Hargrove would totally suck face with you.”

“Okay, hold on a fucking minute!” he sputters. “Even assuming this bullshit your on about him having the hots for me ten years ago is true, that has nothing to do with right now!”

“Steve, you look like a nerd,” she says gently. “And nerd _really_ works for you, dingus. If he doesn’t want to at least make out with you a little, the man has no taste and you need to move on.”

“How about I skip the whole question and move on regardless,” Steve says dryly.

“Then you forfeit the bet and you’re marking all of my quizzes for the entire school year next year.”

“Goddamn it, Robin.”

\---

“Uncle Billy, what are those silver thingies on your tummy?” Lulu asks, poking at the scars covering his torso where her uncle is in the middle of washing the dishes.

Very seriously, Billy says “That’s where I got bitten by the werewolf.”

He hears Max mutter “Oh my god, Billy”, but she doesn’t attempt to dissuade him from telling the story the way he pleased – after all, what would she tell her? That Uncle Billy was possessed by an interdimensional alien being that had come to Hawkins through a hole in the world beneath their feet and fought a monster made of pulverized corpses with his bare hands? Werewolf it is, then!

“Nooo, Uncle Billy, you’re not a werewolf!” she protests with a little giggle.

“Yes I am. Uh-oh, Lulu,” he says somberly. “Oh, no – it’s-it’s the full moon!”

She vibrates with anticipation, giving a loud shriek when Billy lets out a wolf-like howl and lunges for her. “RAAAAAAAAAH!”

“NOOOOOO!!!”

He wears her out good, chasing her around the house for nearly an hour before he convinces her it’s time to go to bed now. He lets Max relax and talks Lulu through bedtime himself. Feeling like a dickhead as he plops down onto the sofa, where Max is watching a rerun of Friends, Billy just sucks it up and says “So, what’s up with Harrington and Spring Break of ’86?”

To his complete surprise, Max’s jaw gets tight and her eyes flash. “Jesus fucking Christ, the people in this town really can’t keep their mouths shut, can they?” she says angrily. “So who told you, huh?”

“Uh…what?” he says blankly, feeling really far away all of a sudden. “Ellie-Eleven told me I need to ask you about Harrington and what happened in ’86, she never said why I need to ask.”

Yeah, he was still very unclear about why this was a story he had to hear.

Max gives him an owlish stare. “She…she wanted you to know?”

“…’s what she said, man.” He shrugs.

“Wow. Okay. Uh…so during Spring Break, one of your old classmates came home from college and threw this really big party,” Max begins, puffing her cheeks out with a sigh. “Steve and his friend Robin – you remember Robin? Blonde, used to work with him at Scoops? They were at this party, and the longer the night went on, the more that shit got out of hand. Like people were passed out on the front lawn. Someone broke into the neighbor’s house because they were too drunk to realize they knocked on the wrong door. Todd Grace took the riding lawn mower from the garage and crashed it somewhere on the golf course down the road. So, naturally the cops showed up.”

“Naturally,” Billy says neutrally, still wondering exactly where in the hell this story was going.

“Everybody freaked when they came in and Robin couldn’t find Steve, so she assumed that he’d hooked up with someone and forgot to tell her that he was leaving. She didn’t realize that he was still there, and he had no idea that the cops had come and were already in the house.”

She stops and stares at the ceiling. “If anybody in this town could keep their mouths closed, that would be the end of the story, but some of the officers blabbed, and now the whole fucking town knows that they found Steve Harrington in a closet on his knees, sucking off two high school seniors.”

Billy’s brain starts floating on ‘Steve Harrington on his knees’ and launches itself into outer space at ‘sucking off’. Immediately it becomes critical that he try not to picture that – young Steve, still doe-eyed and pretty, but brattier, the stuck up ice princess, with his soft sweet mouth wrapped around-

Max’s jaw tightens up with rage again. “I find it really interesting that whenever someone tells that story, they never mention Mike Tentiss or Zach Cooper, but they were the ones standing there with their pants around their ankles.”

Billy stares at the television without really seeing another on the screen. “Why you never tell me that story, Maxine?”

She’s known he was gay since just before she got married. She kept making jokes about getting him a nice girlfriend or hooking up with one of her bridesmaids, until Billy had just snarled over the phone “ _Maxine, I am a FUCKING_ queer!”

Softly, Max says “Cause it started this whole town-wide drama and it almost ruined Steve’s life, Billy. Darlene Cooper tried to have him arrested for molesting her son, but obviously Zach was only a year younger than him. She went around to our house and the Wheeler’s and the Sinclair’s and Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Byers and tried to get one of us to say Steve had…done something to us.”

“Jesus Christ.” That sounds like something out of Billy’s worst nightmares.

She dips her head into a nod. “Uh-huh. It didn’t work, obviously, and Mrs. Byers – I _never_ saw her that mad, Billy. She screamed at Darlene something awful. Some of the parents threw a fit when the school hired him, said he didn’t have any business being around kids, but I think his mom pulled some strings. She and his dad have basically disowned him. He thought none of us would want to speak to him ever again – I mean, the boys got a little weird for a bit, but Erica was…Erica, and they came around. It’s really sad, though. He’s one of the nicest men I know, but no girl in town will go out with him.”

Confused, Billy says “Uh, ain’t he…?”

She shrugs. “Robin says he likes both, I guess. Anyway, no woman in this town will go on a date with him, and no man will so much as be alone in a room with him. Like if Steve sneezes on them, they’ll suddenly want to suck a dick or something.”

 _Oh, I’d do a helluva lot more than be alone in a room with Steve Harrington. And there wouldn’t be any ‘suddenly’ about it_.

Billy realizes that Max is looking very suspicious right now and narrows his eyes. “Max. Maxie. _Maxine_. Maxine Roberta, please tell me that you and Eleven aren’t trying to set me up on a date with Steve Harrington.”

His baby sister looks even guiltier. She picks at her fingernails, staring down at her lap. “You don’t-you’ve never talked about any guys that you’re going out with, you’ve never even told me that you were interested in a guy,” she mumbles. “I just…don’t want you to be lonely. Dustin thinks Steve is – lonely, I mean. You’re the same age and you can both…y’know. Handle all the weird shit around here.”

“Mad Max,” he sighs, and tucked the wisps of red hair behind her ears the way he had for Lulu this morning. “I was not nice to Harrington. I was _never_ nice to Harrington – and I don’t just mean the night I nearly killed him. There was a whole bunch of shit you guys weren’t around to see. The fact that we’re both willing to suck a dick doesn’t change anything, Max.”

“But you apologized for that ten years ago!” She pleads with her big blue eyes. “Please? I’m not asking you to go on a date with him, just be nice to him when you see him, okay?”

Gruffly, he says “That why ya didn’t wanna tell me who Lulu’s teacher was?”

\---

Saturday morning means going to the 11th Hour, because Robin has a hangover and going to the 11th means that they don’t really have to get dressed because El has seen them both covered in mud, blood (their own), blood (others), blood (alien), and puke – all at the same time.

Also, Steve is a grown ass man who can’t be bothered to put on real adult clothes unless he has to teach and today he’s just fucking given up on his hair because the only people who are gonna see him are Robin, who still calls him dingus after ten years of knowing him, and El, who still seems to think he’s Prince Charming after ten years of knowing him (god help her).

Steve and Robin both think it’s very cute that Eleven the Eggo Queen decided she wanted to open a bakery when she grew up. And she’s really good at it, too. She makes this spiced tart thingy with pears and cherries that he would hold someone at gunpoint for. He loves it so much that she makes a big one on his birthday every single year.

Her eyes light up when they walk through the door, looking so pleased that Steve has a guilty thought that they may’ve been neglecting her a little. “Good morning!” she greets, wriggling with excitement as she leans over the counter. “Christmas galette for Steve and for Robbie…?”

“Tart au citron,” Robin says decisively after a moment’s thought. “And coffee.”

“Lots of coffee,” Steve adds with a grimace. The half a bottle of wine was a mistake and he’d known it was gonna be a mistake even as he was pouring their glasses. “El, can you pretty please with chocolate chip Eggos on top make your hangover sandwiches for me? I’ll watch the counter for you! Please?”

Even more pleased, El says “Oh that’s okay, I can make them. Hang on.”

The swinging robin’s egg blue of the backroom door opens, a voice behind it murmuring, “Lulu, skip to my lou. Lulu, skip to my lou.” A distracted Billy walks in carrying Lauren one-handed, half sleeping across her uncle’s shoulder, and a Styrofoam cup in the other. “Lulu, skip to my lou, my darlin’…”

His cheek rests on her head and the forearm supporting Lauren’s weight bulges with muscle beneath the skin and Steve’s fucking knees feel like water.

“Can you watch the front for a few minutes?” El asks pleasantly, ignoring the shell-shocked look on Steve’s face and the intense scrutiny Robin is giving her employee.

“Sure…boss…” Billy says slowly, eyeing his former classmates suspiciously. _He wants this boy’s attention really, really bad, Steve_.

He suppresses a snort. In Nancy’s very succinct words – it’s all just bullshit.

\---

Who let this man walk out of the house that way? Was it Buckley? Was she trying to cause a goddamn riot? Wasn’t there a law against being such a fucking tease? Malicious seduction or something?

Still mostly dressed in pajamas with his glasses hastily shoved on and his hair looking like he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket, Steve looked tired and fresh from bed, even softer and sleepier than the cardigan and khaki look at school yesterday. Billy wanted to push him down on a bed, straddle his waist and kiss him for ages. Kiss him until those heavy eyelids went from surprised to dark and glazed with lust.

“Hello, Mister H,” Lulu, his sweet saving angel, mumbles into his shoulder.

That sunny-warm smile brightens up his face again, and Billy’s heart gives a painful squeeze. “Good morning, Lauren. Are you helping Billy at work?”

“Uh-huh,” she grunts, eyes closing again. “Woke me up.”

“Aw, I’m sorry,” he says, all sympathy and sad eyes.

God, this is fucking torture. And Maxine had to go and like…give him fucking hope and shit. Jesus.

“You wanna go back and lay down in Miss Hopper’s officer, Lulu?”

“Uh-huh,” she repeats, still clinging to his shirt.

He makes his very hasty retreat, not looking at El as he passes her in the kitchen. Unfortunately, when he returns to the front counter, Steve is still there, but Buckley seems to have disappeared and he’s blushing now, maybe because the whole universe fucking hates him and then Steve is right up in his face and says “I’m just gonna get this over with, please don’t hit me-”

And then-

-his mouth, still tinged with the minty clean taste of toothpaste, so fucking soft against Billy’s lips, his long fingers lightly touching Billy’s jawline. Steve’s cheeks are cool where Billy touches them, but his mouth is burning hot. The erection he was just managing to get under control before surges to painful, insistent life in his jeans when Steve sighs and moans, large hand curling around the back of his neck.

Billy answers with a low groan, fingers twisting through the silky strands of his hair to hold him there – not that Steve seems keen to escape.

Breathing is a tragic necessity, though.

“Oh,” Steve exhales as Billy pulls away reluctantly, and his eyes are just as dark, just as sloe and heavy as Billy always dreamed they’d be. He’s still clinging to the front of his shirt and his mouth looks wine-red from kissing, which only makes Billy wanna kiss him more. “I’m gonna grade quizzes for a year.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol as always, i severely underestimate how long i have to go, so i had to add a chapter four to this (which will include an epilogue). hope you guys enjoy it!

Billy has no idea what the fuck Steve is talking about, and he has no interest in anything that’s not their mouths touching each other, anything that’s not Steve’s lips and Steve’s tongue and Steve’s hands.

There’s still some of that Old Billy left in him, a part of him that’s always a bit wild – a little blood in his eyes, a little fire in his heart – and it doesn’t usually require too much effort on his part to put that beast on a leash. But everything about his emotions goes out of control where Steve Harrington is involved.

Billy pushes him backward until he hits the wall, hands gripping his sides too tightly, and leans forward to drags his teeth across Steve’s bottom lip. Steve makes a soft sweet sound of startlement, and his hips jerk sharply. A thick hot ridge presses into Billy’s dick and holy shit that is actually _Steve’s dick_ and he’s so big and so _fucking hard._

A growl vibrates through his vocal cords and he pushes back hard, almost pinning Steve to the wall with his own hips, grinding against him with enough force to leave bruises on them both and pushing his tongue into his mouth with a wet slide. Steve makes a throaty provocative noise, a purring “mmm”, like he’s taken a bite of something really delicious, his fingers digging into Billy’s lower back to hold him there, blunt fingernails cutting gouges into his skin.

Again, they have to break away for air and Steve draws away with a gasped little “uh” that makes Billy feel so fucking dizzy with want, a string of saliva connecting their lips for just a second before Steve tilts his head back, red lips parted and throat bared as he gasps for breath. The temptation is too great for him – Billy traces over the beauty marks and creamy skin with kitten licks of the tongue, sinking back into his boyhood fantasy with relish, softly biting and sucking at every single one.

“Uhhh,” Steve moans under his breath, dragging his nails over his skin and pulling Billy’s erection into alignment with his own, and Billy is-Billy is gonna fucking _explode_ -

"Ahem." There is a tiny cough, more of a pointed clearing of the throat than someone struggling through a late winter illness. 

The two of them probably jump about a foot into the air, scrambling around to figure who had witnessed them trying to all but fuck in public. Buckley was looking amused and very pleased with herself. Outright gloating, she says "I see I won't be grading any quizzes next year."

Steve is blushing hard, hair wilder than ever and lips kiss-bitten, tenting out of the front of his pajama bottoms with an obscene bulge that Billy _needs_ to get his hands and his mouth on. "I-that-you-"

Robin hands him her purse, with a smug smirk. "Here, cover that before someone calls the cops on us," she says, hazel eyes dancing with laughter. "I told you he wouldn't hit you in the face. I can't believe the two of you had a crush on each other and it took you ten years to figure it out."

Billy whirls on Steve. "You-you had a crush on me, pretty boy?" 

Under normal circumstances, he'd be embarrassed by the way his voice cracks, like an acne-ridden boy, but this is an urgent question demanding an urgent answer. 

"You didn't tell him?" Robin laughs. "Oh, Steve. Honey, you can't let your dick do the talking for you."

"I disagree,” Billy says bluntly, eyes darting over his crotch – currently (tragically) hidden behind Robin’s purse.

“Of course you do,” she says in a tone of humoring him, still far too entertained and smug. “Seriously, Steve. You can’t manage one adult conversation?”

Even more flustered – _my god, that pale skin gets so red_ – “I thought he was gonna clock me, I wasn’t about to have a heart to heart!”

“Why the hell did you kiss me if you thought I was gonna deck you?” Billy demands, skin crawling with the discomfort of old longing and older shame.

Steve shrugs rather helplessly, a very dissatisfactory answer.

“He likes to flirt with danger,” Robin informs Billy grimly, giving Steve something of a gimlet stare. “He’s addicted to risk.”

“Rob!” he yelps, looking harassed.

“Steve!” she mocks. “I’m literally gonna get old and die before you talk about your feelings! Hargrove, Steve-o had a big gay crush on you in high school-”

“Oh my god,” Steve moans, covering his face with his hands.

“Can I safely assume that you also had the hots for my man Steve-o at the time?”

“Uh…sort of, yeah,” Billy mumbles, shocked into near honesty.

She gives Steve a pointed stare. "I draw the line at asking him out for you, dingus."

Wild, terrifying hope surges in Billy. "You wanna go out with me?" 

Steve's big dumb doe eyes are directed at the checked linoleum floor. "You-you don't," he mumbles. "The whole town knows I'm a queer, Hargrove. _You_ don't wanna go anywhere in public with me."

"Don't," he says softly, dangerously, boxing him in against the wall with a hand planted beside his head. "Don't tell me I want. No one tells me what I do with my time."

_No one tells me what to do._

"If I say I want a date with you, I mean it." He's throwing himself off a metaphorical cliff here, but the memory of Steve Harrington's face has haunted him for ten years. After knowing his lips and tasting his skin, Billy's sure it will haunt him for thirty more if right now he does nothing. If after all that time, he has a real shot and throws it away because he'd rather stay closeted, if only in Hawkins, then he is nothing more than the scared boy still wilting under Neil Hargrove's control.

Robin, he sees from the corner of his eye, looks almost impressed.

There's a sweet, reluctant little smile tugging at Steve's lips. "Yeah?" With a bit of cheek, a bit of a flirtatious air, he tugs on Billy's button-down shirt. "Can I cook you dinner?"

His brows shoot upward. "Can you actually cook, pretty boy?"

"Say yes, Hargrove," Robin sighs. "If only so I don't have to watch him mope for the next ten years. Even if you don't bone, which is unlikely since Steve is a whore (“Jesus Christ, Rob!”), it’ll probably be the best meal you’ll ever eat in your life. Steve can cook his ass off."

"Wrong choice of words," Steve says dryly.

"Is it, though?" she counters. "If you play 'Hot for Teacher', I'm never speaking to you again."

"Shit, there goes that plan," Steve deadpans.

Billy grins, tongue held between his teeth. These two are great, he feels like he’s watching Frasier, but gayer and with swearing. "The two of you oughta think about getting your own sitcom."

 _"Saved By the Bell?"_ Robin suggests tartly. _"Unmarried with Children? Friends But Gay?"_

 _"Queers,"_ Billy shoots back. "Like _Cheers,_ Buckley, c'mon now."

"Hey, that's not bad," Steve says brightly. Then, shyer and quieter: "Do you like Italian?"

"The sky's still blue ain't it?" he answers, feeling his stomach do an anxious little flutter.

"Last I checked. Meet me after school this Friday, and be hungry."

Billy feels more daring, more confident, so he lets his eyes traveling up Steve's body. Sex hair, red lips, bright eyes, and a beard rash from Billy all over that snow white skin. "That ain't gonna be a problem."

Steve smiles at him, like he's charmed, like Billy's just charmed him. 

Billy wants to take a time machine, go back eleven years into the past and shake himself so goddamn hard. _"Just wait!" _He wants to scream in his 17 year old self’s face. " _Don’t take it out on him, for fuck’s sake!! All you have to fucking do is WAIT!!"_

But he can't do that, and he ends up standing in the store, dumb-struck, when Steve kisses him, fast and hungry, and Robin pulls him out the door.

El watches him at the kitchen door, grinning from ear to ear, looking like a cat that just ate a whole goddamn flock of canaries. "All right you little shit. You win."

"He likes you," she says, looking entirely enamored of this new development. "He _really_ likes you."

Billy's heart goes double-time and his stomach flips all the way over.

Ellie grins even wider. Her chins rests on her fist and she gives one of her excited little wriggles, like a puppy whose seen her favorite person. “You should bring him flowers when you see him.”

He makes a face. “You don’t think it’s too corny?”

“Steve is a romantic,” El coos. “He’ll appreciate the extra effort. And you think he’s worth extra effort, don’t you?”

“Well yeah!” he blurts out, and El’s face is terrifying. Jesus, she looks like a shark when she smiles that way, and Billy realizes that he’s been caught, yet again, havin’ feelings and shit. “I don’t wanna look like I’m coming on too strong. That shit makes some people nervous, you know?”

“Yes,” Eleven agrees solemnly, folding her hands together.

Billy looks at her sharply. “Yeah? What about you, Ellie? You and Max are out here trying to get me dates – you talked to any boy since you and Wheeler broke up?”

She stiffens, fidgeting slightly. “It’s-you know, it’s just more-more difficult because-” El touches the watch over her wrist, worn to conceal the serial number tattooed there. “And the town still think I’m a weirdo, and some of them don’t like me because I’m one of Joyce’s kids, and all of us love Steve. I really only talk to the-the Party-?”

She’s talking very, very fast and she’s tripping over her words and that’s how Billy knows that he’s stumbled upon something that El’s been holding close to her heart. “The Party, eh? Some nerd you-” and he’s falling into a trap but he still can’t see it yet “-got your eye on?”

Immediately after the words come out of his mouth, Billy realizes the black hole that he’s just opened up. The losers who fell into the weirdness of the Upside Down were not a large number. Wheeler, whose relationship with Ellie is over. Byers, who might actually be queerer than Billy himself. Sinclair, who still makes eyes at Max when her back is turned. And-

“Henderson?!” he demands incredulously. “Do you have a crush on _Henderson_?!”

Eleven, his poor Ellie, fiddles with her apron and stares at a point over his shoulder instead of looking him in the eyes. “I-I didn’t say that. I never said that.”

Oh, poor girl. She doesn’t even have to. El’s face is starting to look blotchy, like she might burst into frustrated tears. “El,” he says gently. “Ellie, any one of the nerd-herd would trip over themselves face-first for you. Ask the boy out – he’s gonna say yes and thank sweet Jesus for the chance.”

Looking outright miserable now, El says “I can’t.” No, she doesn’t just look miserable, she looks like she might be sick. “I’m-I haven’t-I don’t-”

Billy doesn’t really understand what she’s trying to tell him until El gestures at her lower body, quickly swiping angry tears from her eyes. “Oh,” he says, though he can hardly fathom it. “That’s-that ain’t _that_ big a deal.”

“Do you know any other twenty-four year old virgins?” she snaps, flushed with shamed anger.

“Probably Henderson too?” he jokes, then feels like shit when her lower lip wobbles. “That doesn’t matter! Do you…want to?”

“I-I wasn’t ready. And now it’s probably too late. He’s had like ten girlfriends!” El wails, blotting her face again. “They’ve all been really smart and pretty, Billy!”

“ _Baby_ ,” he soothes, heart breaking for her as he folds her into a hug. “ _You’re_ smart and pretty. And I need you to know that if he does anything to hurt you, I’ll take a _psychotic_ level of pleasure in destroying everything he loves.”

A laugh escapes her, thin and watery. “Bitchin’.”

\---

"Oh my god," Steve says on way back to the car. "Robin-"

"I know."

"He fucking said yes, Rob-"

"I know."

"I'm making him dinner."

"Mhm."

"Oh my god, what am I gonna do? I'm-I'm gonna fuck this up, Rob, I-" He pauses, taking in the look on her face. Robin is staring at him serenely, brows pitched slightly upwards. "I'm being an idiot again, aren't I?"

"Only a tiny one," she says, with great loyalty.

"Hurry up, I need to clean everything I own twice." Again, when he's sitting in the driver's seat, staring with blank disbelief out the front windshield. "He said he likes me."

"Yeah, babe," Robin says gently, reaching over to squeeze his hand. "He did."

This she won't make fun of. Whom Steve loves, he loves without caution, holding nothing back for himself, and with every expectation that his affection will be spat on and thrown back at him. It was heartbreaking to watch, and she'd seen it happen too many times. 

Trying to keep him from stumbling into a pit of his own anxiety and insecurity, Robin asks "So...is he a good kisser?"

Steve's face floods with heat and he breaks out into this goofy adorable grin. _"Such_ a good kisser, Rob."

She smirks. "It sounded like you were being mauled by a wild animal."

Dreamily, Steve says "His lips taste like strawberry jam and he smells like a bonfire in a forest of pine trees. He can maul me any time he wants to."

"Oh, he wants," Robin drawls with laughter in her voice. " _Trust_ me, he wants.”

He spends nearly a week randomly flooded with giddy anticipation and nervousness but by the time Friday actually rolls around, he kinda…forgets? It’s not that he forgot he and Billy have a date, it’s that when the actual agreed upon time comes around, Steve is a bit too distracted to notice.

\---

Billy isn’t dumb enough to bring the flowers with him – there’s forward and then there’s forward, y’know?

Rather than being in his classroom, Billy is stopped short just before he turns the hallway down to the primary kids section when he hears Steve’s voice, quiet and very serious. “Why did you hit him?”

“He-he said I was stupid!” a little boy says, with all the blind impulsive fury of a small child. “Him and Hannah wo-wouldn’t play with me!”

Completely surprising him, Steve solemnly asks “So Denny hurt your feelings?”

A quiet sniffing, and then a mumbled “Uh-huh.”

“That’s wasn’t very nice of him to say, Martin,” he says sympathetically. “Do you want a ‘feel better’ hug?”

Even quieter, like he was scared to say it out loud: “Uh-huh.”

And when Billy peeks around the corner, Steve is crouched on the ground, hugging Martin Roberts as he snuffles into his shoulder. Billy is having an emotion, and it’s A Big One, even if he doesn’t quite understand what that emotion is.

“Do you feel ready to say sorry to Denny for hitting him, and he can say sorry for hurting your feelings like that?”

“Yeah.” Martin does sound much calmer, actually.

Steve stands and spots him, gives Billy a small smile, like he hasn’t just broken his brain a little bit. “Sorry I’m running a bit late.”

“Take your time,” Billy says, thunderstruck.

He wonders what would’ve happened, what his life would’ve been like if one of his teachers had been even half as patient and understanding as that with him. 

\---

Billy says "Go ahead and unlock the door, I left something in my car."

Angie is his living doorbell, so as soon as Billy returns and opens the door, she's right there, wailing in her usual piteous manner. Steve already assembled the sauce for dinner, it just needs to be warmed up and the fresh pasta boiled to tender.

"Who is this?" Billy asks, amused.

"That's Angie. Pet her - she expects to be greeted at the door and she won't leave you alone until you do." Steve goes out to the hall and stares, owl-eyed.

In one arm, Billy has Angie who looks very smug at having seduced Steve’s man, and in the other- Dumbly, Steve asks “Did you buy me flowers?”

“Uh…” Billy says, uncharacteristically bashful. He lets Angie drop back to the floor with a heavy thump. “…yes?”

He could tease him – ‘is that a question or an answer?’ – the problem is that he’s stumbled and fallen face-first into a giant pile of infatuation. “They’re beautiful,” he breathes, eyes wide, tentatively reaching out to lightly brush his fingers over the petals. Billy bought him red carnations. Not quite as obvious as red roses and somehow both lurid and innocent. “Let me find something to put them in.”

He leans forward with head tilted, hand around the collar of Billy’s shirt, and gets halfway to kissing him when he realizes that this is maybe overplaying his hand. But like…Billy Hargrove bought him flowers? _Fuck it, I’m gonna kiss him_.

Gently, he presses their lips together and Billy let out a sweet little sigh, slipping his fingers through Steve’s belt loops to pull him closer. His mouth is soft, full, _velvety,_ and discovering it again is so delicious that Steve gets lost in him. Billy licks his lips as they part. "Still having Italian, I see."

Steve blushes. "Uh, yeah." Quickly, he scrambles away with flowers in hand before he can do something incredibly dumb and classy like offer to make himself the first course. "Hope you're hungry."

"In many ways," Billy replies huskily, eyes shamelessly undressing Steve right there in the kitchen. 

So maybe he preens a little. So maybe he bends over a little too long as he grabs a vase from beneath a sink. It's been such a long time, he thinks wistfully, since someone wanted him in such an open, brazen way. He gets laid...well, not often but not _never,_ either. But that’s quick, hurried fumbling in a bar bathroom of the next town over or fast hand jobs in dark places.

He doesn't get a bed, or lots of kissing, or arms to hold him afterwards. He doesn't get the next morning or lazy sex in the sunlight. Women think he's gay and men are scared shitless to be seen talking to him longer than ten minutes. He gets scraps and has to be happy with it because up until now, he understood that was the best he could hope for after being outed in a small town.

"You're a little cocktease," Billy rasps, eyes fixed rather desperately to the way his dark jeans are hugging Steve's ass.

"Can you blame me?" Steve asks with a smirk over his shoulder, letting Billy look his fill. "Spent a year watching you strut around without a shirt on, sweating and pushing me around. And I was such a dumbass, it took me a whole year after that to figure out why I was half-hard every time I saw you walk onto the court."

"Yeah?" Billy purrs. Oh, maybe Steve shouldn't be giving shit like that out. Too much ammunition. "Did I have you chubbing up your shorts?"

Steve rolls his eyes. He's sure that to Billy, he must've seemed terribly obvious. The hopeless bisexual disaster with his tenting shorts, either unable to figure out what he wanted or without the guts to do something about it. "You know you did."

"No," Billy replies quietly, with much more seriousness. "I didn't know."

Steve pauses to fill the vase. "...that wasn't why you were teasing me?"

"No. I teased ya because I wanted the prettiest boy in school to pay attention to me," he admits, an almost helpless note to his voice, looking genuinely pained.

Startled, Steve says "Okay, but I wasn't _actually_ the best looking guy in-"

"My frigid ice princess, he froze me out in every direction, no matter how I pushed him. And when he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I hurt him." Billy closes his eyes, as though the memory makes him sick, even now.

“I’m not cold,” Steve says quietly, setting the vase filled with lushly blooming carnations on the counter, and watches him practically do a double-take.

“ _That’s_ what you chose to take away from that?!” he demands.

Coldness reminds him too much of his parents. Looking at Billy through his lashes, Steve says “You already apologized for that years ago. But I resent being called frigid. I’m not cold.”

 _My frigid ice princess_. He refuses to accept being called cold. But he doesn’t refuse being called Billy’s.

Billy’s stare is piercing and he lifts a hand to draw a rough thumb over Steve’s lower lip. “No,” he rumbles. “You ain’t, are you?”

Billy has always possessed this weird (well, it seemed less weird after he figured out he was attracted to him) magnetism for him, this force that draws Steve in. Time has not diminished that force.

Again, he pulls Billy in by the collar, their tongues curling around each other, and Steve gasps “I have to finish dinner!” with a ragged voice, even though his arms are still around Billy’s shoulders.

“Hurry,” he says in a soft burr, beard scraping over Steve’s neck as he nuzzles into him and sending a hot crackle of sexual tension through him.

“ _Who_ is a cocktease?” he demands weakly.

“Oh, I definitely am,” Billy says with a wicked smile. A daring hand cups the full expanse of one buttock and gives Steve a possessive squeeze. “Better feed me good – gotta keep my energy up.”

“Oh my god,” Steve says, face flushed as he turns back to the sauce on the stove. “You’re awfully sure of yourself.”

“If you wanna play hard to get, I don’t mind a game of cat and mouse,” he says with a smile that’s positively predatory. “But to be honest, I don’t think you have that kinda patience in you, Harrington.”

Steve salts the boiling water and throws Billy his most heavy-lidded flirtatious smile. Subconsciously, he mimics Billy’s lip-licking motion. “If you wanna get in my pants, you’d better learn to say ‘Steve’.

Billy strokes his beard, letting him see the heat in his eyes. “ _Stevie_ ,” he husks, his stare consuming Steve’s whole body like a physical touch. “Stevie-baby. Darlin’.”

He has to make himself keep focusing on cooking because he knows that if turns around right now, all this work will have gone to waste. “Make yourself useful,” he says hoarsely. “And grab the bottle of wine from the fridge.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” he drawls, brows raised. “Holy shit, Steve. If the kids make you drink this much you might wanna consider a new line of work.”

“Most of those are nearly empty,” he says, rolling his eyes. The corner of Steve’s mouth lifts and he adds, “The kids are fine. It’s some of the parents I can’t stand.”

He sets his vase of carnations on the end table beside the sofa where they can be admired, and wonders if Billy’s already noticed that next door, Melanie Dohr’s class has twenty-four children but his classroom only has sixteen. Several parents were so outraged that he was hired on for the kindergarteners that they outright refused to allow their kids to set foot in his classroom.

Maxine van Haut had been one of only two parents to actually volunteer, _in public_ , to put her daughter in his care. To his utter surprise and disbelief, his old classmate and former friend Carol Bainbridge had been the other parent.

Billy watches him drop nests of fresh pasta dough into the boiling water with fascination. Steve counts to thirty in his head before scoops the noodles, just underdone, from the water and into the sauces, adding a knob of butter before he lets the tomato, cream, and herbs meld together.

“How did you learn to do this?” Billy asks, as he adds a pinch of red pepper flakes and begins plating their pasta.

“Um…well, after my parents basically told me not to bother going back to their house ever again, I was sad and when you’re sad, you eat a lot. I became obsessed with making the most complicated, ridiculous things I could find. If I was focused on the food, I didn’t have to focus on why I was making it,” Steve says lightly.

He realizes too late that he’s probably oversharing. He does that a lot when he likes someone – Robin calls it his ‘Achilles heel’, whatever the hell that means. She says that once he’s attached to someone, he can’t let them go, even when it hurts, which is why Rob and Nance are still his friends. He doesn’t see the problem really. Who couldn’t use another friend? So it hurts for a little while, he still gets the rich reward of a friend forever.

“After I figured out how to make things that would break my brain, I started focusing on how to make them delicious. On that note: please don’t ever say the word ‘barbecue’ around Rob, that’s a ten hour lecture nobody needs to hear again, even though I only gave _myself_ food poisoning.”

“You…gave yourself food poisoning?” Billy asks slowly, eyeing their plates.

“Yeah, who would’ve thought that grilling and drinking don’t mix.” Steve shrugs and grins. “Grab the wine and the glasses, I’ll get the plates.”

Steve has a reasonable level of confidence regarding his own skill. He still blushes to what he’s positive is probably a firetruck red when Billy takes his first bite and makes a noise that’s more suited to a man receiving a blow job than a man eating a meal. He whispers, “Holy fuck, Harrington”, eyes closed in reverential bliss. The rings on Billy’s fingers gleam, silver and gold and ruby, as he holds his knuckles to his mouth, as though he’s tasting divinity.

Steve grins at his fork. For a while, there’s no talking because Billy has zero interest in anything that’s not this meal.

They actually make conversation like real ass adults, which he will tell Robin about later because she’ll be proud of him for that.

It takes them until the end of dinner, laying back on the sofa and trying to not die because they are both full, that they get to a topic deeper than day to day activities. Because it’s sort of the elephant in the room with them, Steve decides to break the taboo and says “So…where did you go, when you left town back then? Max told us she thought you went back home to see your mom.”

It maybe wasn’t the thing to say, because for a moment, Billy’s eyes look flinty and cold. “No,” he says finally. “I never stayed in Bakersfield for too long. I only went to see her once. She-the way she saw the world was one way, and the way I saw it was another way, I guess.”

Steve’s nose wrinkles. “What does that mean?”

Billy’s jaw tightens. “It means that when you’re on your second marriage with a six-year-old kid at home and your first son shows up on your doorstep as a wild-eyed man fresh outta the hospital, you’re gonna call him a raving lunatic, slam the door in his face, and threaten to call the cops if he doesn’t leave you alone.”

Steve’s spine goes rigid. “Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Steve blurts out. “Jesus, she sounds like a shitty parent. I mean, mine aren’t a whole lot better, but they wouldn’t call the cops on me.” 

Billy shrugs, though he can see the shadow of old pain in his eyes. He takes a sip of wine, probably to steady his nerves, before commenting, “Yeah, Max told me why you probably won’t run for mayor anytime soon.” Reflexively, Steve grimaces and Billy chuckles slightly. “Kinda sorry I wasn’t here for that.”

“For my public humiliation?” he says, trying to ride the fine line between bitterness and black humor.

“For your ‘ _awakening’_ ,” Billy purrs. He’s looking at Steve’s neck the way Steve imagines lions stare at the necks of gazelle on the savannah. “I’m not the picture of class and taste, but I’m pretty sure I coulda gave you better than a coat closet.”

Steve can’t quite bring himself to look at him directly. “You _were_ there for it, in a way. You were the reason that I realized I wasn’t completely straight.” It’s his turn to reach for the wineglass. “You raced out of Hawkins, and I realized that I had a meteor-sized crush on a boy I was never going to see again, and the last time I _had_ seen him, he was dying in front of me.”

Even now, with Billy right in front of him, he can’t hold that memory too closely or he’ll just start bawling. It’s probably tied with his mother telling him Steve needs to stay with Robin and leave his keys for his most painful memory.

Keeping his head down, Steve adds “And I maybe didn’t deal with that too well, so after that was a series of really terrible decisions Rob is too nice to blab to other people about, but will never let me live down in private, all neatly wrapped up with outing myself to the whole town.”

Billy is very quiet and it takes a moment for him to gather the courage to look at him. Billy’s stare has become penetrating, and unwavering. Lowly, he says “Maybe we dodged a bullet with me leaving, then.” He smiles grimly. “Cause the person I used to be wouldn’t have been too nice about knowing you were willing to suck a dick and the dick wasn’t mine, Harrington. And I don’t just mean not nice to you. I woulda made the whole fucking town pay for that.”

Trying to hide his nervousness, Steve rests a hand on his elbow and sips from his glass. “I’m not exactly inexperienced, you know. What does the person you are now think about that?”

“I think…that I don’t really care what you’ve done before,” Billy says slowly. “Or who you’ve done it with.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence,” Steve observes.

“If you’re the kind of person who gets bored with having the same partner, you might wanna cut this short,” he informs him bluntly. “I don’t like sharing, and I try to be a better person than I was, but I’m not about to tell you I’m not a jealous possessive bastard, because I’m never gonna lie to you. I am.”

He leaves his glass on the table. “I’m pretty sure there’s this saying, ‘only boring people get bored’.” Steve leans his head back into cushions, feeling full and sluggish and maybe a little bit horny. He skims his fingers slowly up Billy’s thigh. “If you don’t wanna get bored, you have to put in the work.”

“Yeah?” Steve is transfixed by the way Billy’s tongue curls around his teeth. Teasingly, Billy says “You gonna work for it, baby?”

Steve kneads the muscle in his thigh, thick and warm beneath the denim, and feels heat begin to coil in his belly. “I think…you should let me worry about that,” he murmurs, tracing his thumb up the inner seam of his jeans. Billy’s breathing stutters and he smiles, slow and satisfied. “And relax.”

He swings a leg over Billy, settling on his lap and leaning in for a kiss as he unzips his jeans. Billy breathes “Shit” against his lips and starts unbuckling Steve’s belt.

Steve’s pants end up thrown over an arm of the sofa, where they’ll probably end up covered in black cat hair, and he opens the fly of Billy’s jeans so that their dicks only have two thin layers between them instead of four. It’s been too long and Steve moans “fuck” as he settles back down onto his lap. He can feel Billy pulsing, the wet spot forming in his boxers and Steve pants, open-mouthed as he grinds down, slow and lazy.

“No, c’mon,” Billy says raggedly, pulling at the buttons on his shirt. “Don’t just gimme half a show, baby. Let me see that body.”

Steve helps him, flipping his tie off and sending it to hang out with his slacks, and pulling his cardigan over his head. He knows when Billy notices what’s beneath the linen when his hands skim up Steve’s chest and pluck at his nipples, gently tugging at the medical grade steel embedded in his skin. “Oh, you’ve got goodies,” Billy groans, mouthing over the fabric. Steve hisses and arches up to meet the touch, lightly pulling at his dirty blond hair. “Naughty Stevie, trying to hide his goodies from me – oh. Baby, you _are_ all grown up.”

“I shaved,” Steve chokes out, throwing his shirt to the side and trying to steer Billy’s mouth – his _teeth_ , especially – back to his nipples. Billy strokes the dark thatch of hair on his chest, tantalizingly close to where he wants him. “In high school, I shaved it. I thought it was weird, how much I had.”

“Hmm,” Billy purrs thoughtfully, rubbing his face in it. Steve moans and squirms as the much rougher hair of his beard scraps and catches on the permanently sensitive skin. “Think I like it.”

“You,” Steve starts, hoarse and cracked, then swallows and tries again. He wants Billy, wants his sweat and skin and heat, wants all those things he never usually gets. “Yours too, Billy.”

“It ain’t pretty, Steve,” he warns.

“Do you really think that’s worse than watching it happen?” he whispers, pulling Billy in for a kiss, deep and intense. “It’s alright, c’mon.”

There are large scars, thick and deep and silvery, all across Billy’s chest and stomach, places where the Mindflayer tried to kebab him. Steve runs his hands across all of it – the scarred and the unblemished, the ugly and the statuesque – and bends to kiss him everywhere. None of it surprises him, and to him, it’s both terrible and miraculous. Every piece of logic in the universe says that Billy Hargrove should have died that day, and yet, here he is, warm and shuddering beneath Steve’s hands.

“I didn’t know why,” he continues at a whispers. “I didn’t understand why I had a hard time looking away from you. I remember watching the way the sweat dripped off you on the court.” He hums and traces a hand down Billy’s chest, over the muscles and scars, the same path of the sweat in his mind’s eye. “I was so stupid – I thought I was jealous of your looks. Nobody says that men look ‘beautiful’. But you were, and you still are.”

“Don’t need to sweet talk me,” Billy murmurs, nosing at his jaw. He pets at Steve’s hair, hand caressing all the way down his spine. “I’m a sure thing, sweetheart.”

“What if I just want to?” Steve says with a smile, bangs hanging into his eyes. “What if I think you need someone to be nice to you?”

“Is that what you think?” Billy asks, and plucks a flower from the vase. “Maybe I think that’s what you need, too.”

Gently, he uses the petals to trace the shape of Steve’s lips, his knuckles brushing the shape of his cock through his briefs. Breathlessly, he gasps “Billy Hargrove is a romantic. Stop the presses! Breaking news!”

“No one will ever believe you,” he says sweetly, clamping the stem between his teeth. “I’ve committed the perfect crime.”

He hauls himself and Steve from the couch, cackling as Steve yells and clutches onto his shoulders. He prays that Billy is as strong as he looks. “Turn left!” he yelps. “Bedroom is the last door.”

As soon as they are safely on the bed and Billy is no longer trying to bear both of their weight, Steve snatches the flower from his mouth to kiss him.

“You’re a madman,” he says with admiration, caressing his cheek with the petals.

“I’ve met Wheeler, you’re deeply attracted to the mentally disturbed,” he accuses, plucking at Steve’s piercings to make him squirm.

Billy draws his teeth lightly over his left nipple. “Yeah, like that.” Tugging gently on his hair and pushing his ass down on Billy’s cock, his limp fingers surrender the carnation back to him. The petals feel like velvet against his ultra-sensitive nipples and Steve chokes down his whines. “Bite them, _please_. _Billy_.”

He’s leaking all over his underwear, dick jumping and twitching with each little nip and sharp bite, mindlessly frotting with him, and Billy squeezes at his ass, rolls up his hips to meet him. “Fuck, you’re big.”

“I thought you’d want to top,” he gasps. “I don’t mind.”

He hums and looks up at Steve through his impossibly long lashes. His eyes are dark and glittering. “Maybe I just want to do this. Maybe I just want to see you fall apart on top of me.”

That fucking flower – he’s still holding the carnation, uses the scarlet petals to paint a path down over his stomach, and swirls it over the wet patch of fabric where the head of his cock is trapped by the fabric. “Your hands,” he pleads, pulling lightly at his hair again, guiding his other hand, calloused and covered in rings, into his lap. “God, you have such beautiful hands, Billy.”

Billy gets his palm around Steve’s length and grunts as Steve turns his head and tugs on his earlobe with his teeth. “Imagine me jerking you off, like this?” he rumbles, rough skin grating over Steve’s cock. “Huh, baby? You think about me in the dark, when you were alone? Did you think about my hands?”

“Your hands,” Steve rasps, and kisses him softly. He can’t get his fill of Billy’s skin, rough, silky, smooth, and everything in between. “The way a cigarette looked in your mouth. You pressed up against my back. Sweat running down your body and _Billy_ , how much I wanted to touch you-”

Billy cuts him off with a low groan, biting at Steve’s lower lip and abandoning the carnation to give his nipple a cruel twist, grinning against his mouth as Steve convulses. “I dreamed ‘a you, Stevie. I dreamed of your big heartbreaker’s eyes and your pretty lips.” He touches his neck and Steve realizes that he’s tracing the moles all over his skin. “I thought about the noises you’d make if I kissed you here. How you’d sound when you came. For me.”

“I’m gonna,” Steve croaks, sucking at Billy’s tongue. Imagining that he’s sucking something else. He’s surrounded in the pine and bonfire smell of him, and his thighs shake around Billy’s hips.

“How you’d taste,” Billy growls, and Steve can taste _him_ , the strawberry jam sweetness of him, and he could _cry_. “Don’t leave me waitin’ for it, Stevie.”

“Fuck, oh fuck,” he cries, trembling hard.

“Let me hear it.”

And Steve sobs “ _Billy_. Don’t stop, Billy.”

“I got you, Stevie-baby.”

His body is liquid fire in Billy’s hands, fluid and burning ember-bright. Billy keeps kissing him, frantic and hungry, even while Steve is out of breath, and he doesn’t realize why until Billy starts squirming out his jeans and underwear and starts jerking himself off harshly, still kissing at Steve’s neck.

“Stop,” he slurs, and rolls on top of him, pinning Billy’s arms to the bed.

“Steve,” he whines. “Don’t be a brat. Just-”

“Let me do it, baby,” Steve murmurs, stroking his belly and throwing his best bedroom eyes. He strokes his hands up Billy’s thighs for extra insurance and licks his lips. “Let me get you there, Billy.”

“Fuck,” Billy whispers hoarsely, briefly closing his eyes. “Okay. Yeah.”

Just because he’s gonna do it doesn’t mean he’s gonna make it easy.

Lazily, Steve French kisses his way down Billy’s chest, treating the scarred skin the same as the silky-smooth muscles, taking his time to lick down his body, letting himself taste the salt and musk. He by-passes Billy’s cock, weeping all over his stomach, only stopping to lap up the little pool forming above the head.

“ _Steve_ ,” Billy hisses. “Jesus fuck – PLEASE.”

He sucks hard on his inner thighs, biting at him until it will bruise. “I’ve thought of this so many times,” he admits, gently pressing his thumb beneath his balls, brushing his other fingers so achingly close to his cock. Billy nearly jack-knifes off the mattress, swearing at him as his fists pull on the sheets. “And it’s better than anything I could’ve imagined.”

“I wondered what you’d do,” he murmurs, kissing just alongside his cock. “If I was on my knees for you.”

“I’m gonna fucking _die,”_ Billy gasps, touching his hair, stroking it away from his face. “ _Steve_ -”

He makes sure he’s watching, makes sure Billy’s eyes are open as he circles his fingers around him and _s l i d e s_ his cock, hot and wet with precum, past his lips. He hums and groans at the velvety heat in his mouth and Billy bucks the tiniest bit, moaning like a dying man as his dick rubs over the silky slickness of his tongue.

“Steve,” he says, weak and reedy, “… _sweetheart_ …”

He hollows his cheeks and groans again, giving Billy a come-hither stare. Billy’s head falls back onto the pillow, crimson lips parted as he pants, loud and desperate. Oh, Steve likes him this way. Billy’s beautiful. He’s always been beautiful, but he’s worn into this beauty, like the softest cotton shirt in the drawer.

Steve sucks him, slurping and sloppy and wet, presses his fingers ruthlessly to Billy’s perineum.

“FUCK,” he roars and grips Steve’s hair just this side of too tight. Shoves up into his mouth, always just shy of choking him, and begs softly. “Take me, gorgeous. Fuck, like that. Gonna come, Stevie, gonna come for your hot mouth-

He screams without making noise and Steve licks him clean, flicking the jizz from his lips like a cat licking cream.

“Jesus Christ.” Billy says, still breathing hard. “Stevie, you’re worth waiting ten years for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they're so gross and in love i hate it


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have some more thoughts about this universe that i may or not get to, but they aren't really relevant to the story i wanted to tell here, so those will have to be for another tale :D

Billy is deliciously warm, deliciously relaxed and deeply asleep when the phone rings on the table beside the bed. He gives a displeased grunt and buries his face into the pillow as Steve rolls away from him to pick up the call, hoarsely croaking “’ello?” There’s a pause as he listens to the caller, then surprises Billy by tapping him on the shoulder. “For you, Billy.”

What the fuck? He mumbles a confused “Hello?”

“I’m so sorry.” Max sounds as tired as he is, maybe more. “But Lauren refuses to go to sleep – I told her that you’d be back in the morning, but it’s already almost midnight, and the more tired she is, the more upset she gets. Can you please talk to her for just a few minutes?”

“Yeah,” he slurs. “’a course. Lemme get up first so we ain’t talking in Steve’s ear while he’s tryin’ to sleep.”

“Oh my god,” Max says miserable and guilty, repeating “I’m so sorry, Billy.”

“No, no, no – it’s okay,” Gently, he closes the door behind him, thankful that Steve owns a cordless phone and trying not to walk into a wall. “I shoulda knew she’d bug out if I didn’t come home.”

Max murmurs “Lauren, Uncle Billy wants to talk to you.”

His whole heart breaks – Lulu is sucking in air hard, sobbing quietly. Poor Max must’ve been trying to get her to sleep for hours. “Hey, my girl. Why won’t you let Mommy tuck you in?”

“Wh-wh-why did you leave?!” she wails, sorrow all renewed.

“I didn’t leave you, baby. I’m having a sleepover with my friend, I’ll be back tomorrow. Mommy told you that, right?”

In a tiny voice, Lulu replies, “Yes.”

“I’m never gonna leave you without saying goodbye, Lulu,” he says softly. “I promise. Who’s my girl?”

“I-I am,” she hiccups, but she sounds a few shades calmer now.

“That’s right. And it’s gonna snow tomorrow, so I thought I’d take my girl out to make a snowman,” he says solemnly. “But we can’t do that if you’re too tired to play outside, Lulu. Can you lay down and close your eyes for me?”

“Don’t hang up!” she says, a bit frantic, and Billy feels another tug on his heartstrings.

“Won’t hang up, baby. Close your eyes for me and lay down. Okay? _Lulu, skip to my Lu. Lulu, skip to my Lu. Lulu, skip to my Lu. Skip to my Lu, my darlin’_ …”

He has to stay with her, and sing to her, for he doesn’t know how long. He won’t leave until he’s sure that she won’t feel abandoned and there’s a period of calm before Max whispers “She’s asleep now. Thank you so much, Billy.”

She sounds close to tears herself. She’s probably been up since four or five o’clock this morning and as it turns out, Lulu isn’t the only girl with a piece of his heart. “Sweet dreams, little sister.”

“Sweet dreams, big brother.” Max sniffles.

Billy stumbles back toward the bedroom and finds Steve basically doing what he was doing for Lulu, except that Steve is singing his song to his fucking cat, a dark blob resting on his stomach as he pets her, scratching her around the ears and beneath her chin. “ _With no lovin’ in our souls, and no money in our clothes, you can’t say we’re satisfied_ …”

His voice is a beautiful purr, husky with sleep, warm and loving to an animal that Steve obviously cares about.

Billy is leveled like the Starcourt fucking Mall.

He blurts out, “You’re gettin’ the words wrong. It’s ‘coats’, not ‘clothes’.”

Fuckin’ smooth, Hargrove. Real fuckin’ smooth.

“Mmkay,” Steve says serenely, eyes closed. “It sounds better my way.”

 _Anything coming out of your mouth sounds better_. “Yeah, it kinda does, doesn’t it?”

As he slides back underneath the covers, Angie gets annoyed with them moving around the bed and hops off to wander back out of the room, tail held high. Steve curls around him, humming contentedly under his breath. Steve’s nose brushes along his neck, breathing inward, and Billy feels like he’s gonna die, because this much happiness at once just can’t be good for you. His mouth has gone dry.

Steve gives another contented hum, wrapping an arm around his waist and a leg around his hips. His hand, resting at Billy’s heart, caresses down the scarred skin and muscle to rest near the waistband of his boxers, and Steve’s thumb leisurely strokes up and down his lower belly, through the trail of hair leading down to his crotch. He murmurs against Billy’s skin “I never get this.”

“Hm. I hope I’d remember getting you to feel me up,” Billy replies, grinning at the quiet darkness.

“No.” He feels Steve grin against his shoulder, which is…just…the best feeling. “A bed. Talking. Just…letting me kiss you.”

“ _Letting you_ ,” Billy repeats, a bit sarcastically. “It’s become my cross to bear.”

Steve lightly bites him on the shoulder, and Billy can feel the way his mouth still stretches around a smile. “Okay, you know what I’m saying here.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. But ain’t no hardship, sweetheart.” He squeezes Steve’s hand, and he’s silent for long enough that Billy asks, “What’chu thinkin’ about, Stevie?”

Steve sighs, low and sweet, fingers still petting at his belly. “Billy Hargrove thinks I’ve got heartbreaker’s eyes. I’m thinking ‘bout that.”

“You do,” he whispers, earnest, heart in his throat. “Took your sunglasses off and I see these big brown eyes – and my soul left my fuckin’ body, Steve, I swear. I remember-” Billy swallows, and part of him can go back to that scared, raging, confused boy. “I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair, that no boy should be able to break my heart with just his eyes.”

Steve laughs, ducking his face into Billy’s neck sheepishly, even though Billy can’t see him anyway. His skin is hot against his own, lashes like the flutter of his butterfly wings over his skin, making his heart thud harder. “You _are_ a real romantic. I never get that, either.”

Billy snorts, but he can’t really deny it. “It’s too bad, y’know. Cause you’re pretty good at this part, darlin’. Where the hell is my lullaby, though?”

Steve pets his skin some more, slow and lazy, and Billy thinks that maybe he’s already falling asleep-

“ _Which way you goin’, Billy? Can I go, too?_ ” he croons, fingertips warm and gentle on his skin, petting his abdomen and stroking along the tendons of his neck, lips warm and whisper soft upon his skin. “ _Which way you goin’, Billy? Can I go with you?_ _You are my whole, babe, my heart and soul, babe. I’d have nothing to show, babe, if you go away_ …”

He’s got chills running up and down his spine, even though his face and chest feel hot and feverish. Billy’s _dying_ , he’s dying, because he knows now that his love was never wasted on this boy. “ _Who’s_ the real romantic?” he whispers hoarsely, relaxing his weight back against Steve’s body. “You’re sweet, Stevie.”

“You’re not fooling me,” he murmurs back and kisses beneath his ear, soft and wet. Billy shudders. “You are, too.”

He takes Steve’s hand, smooth from a life of finger-paint and glitter-glue, and presses his mouth to the palm. “Gotta keep that our special secret, darlin’.”

Sleepily, Steve says “Ain’t a secret, baby.”

\---

Steve spends a week just sort of walking on fucking air.

“What’s up, buddy?” Steve doesn’t even bother to ask who it is – Dustin calls him at five o’clock on the dot, every Monday. “Excited to finish up your midterms and come home for a little while?”

“Yeah, I’m going straight to a study group as soon we’re done.” He sounds as cheerful as he ever is, but by now, Steve is also intimately familiar with what he sounds like when he’s tired, too.

“Okay, but try to make sure you get enough rest,” Steve says, holding the phone on his ear with his shoulder as he lifts Angie onto his lap. “You’re smarter when you’ve slept longer than four hours a night, buddy.”

“Yeah, I know.” Then, a little less cheerfully, “So, uh…how are you feeling?”

Steve frowns. Had he been sick the last time he talked to Dustin? He didn’t think so… “Uh…fine? Why?”

“Well, you know…the ten year anniversary is coming up,” Dustin says awkwardly. He sounds distinctly like he’s also frowning now. Unhappy. “And like…I get worried about you, and stuff.”

“Dustin…”

“-and you always say you’re fine, even when you’re definitely not fine…”

“…pal…”

“Robin says you’re okay, which I guess is good but…”

“ _Dustin_.”

“-it’s not the same as be able to see for myself…”

“Dude, seriously-”

“And you’re _lonely_ , man, the people there treat you like shit!”

“DUSTIN!” Steve says loudly, scaring poor Angie right off his lap. “…I have a boyfriend.”

He says the words before really thinking about them and all of their implications. Dustin lets out this hilarious little ‘eep!’ before shrieking “Oh my god, really?!” like he’s suddenly sixteen again and asking Steve how two men have sex, in the technical sense, and jeez-

Steve really misses him, feels his eyes sting. “Yeah. I mean…it’s a new thing, but we’ve already gone on a few dates and it’s going pretty well.”

“Really? Okay, well, what’s he like?!” Dustin asks impatiently.

“Uh, well…” Nervously, Steve wishes that he hadn’t bought a cordless phone. His fingers have nothing to play with in moment like these. “You sort of already know him…Or, I guess, _knew_ him, would be the better way to put it.”

Exasperated, Dustin says, out of the blue, “Oh my god, if it’s Tommy Hall, Steve, I know he had a crush on you, but you can do way better-”

“ _What_?! No, Tommy Hall didn’t-what the fuck, who gave you that idea?”

“Robin,” he says, with an obvious ‘duh’ at the end.

“ _What the fuck_?!” Steve repeats, this time at a volume that makes Angie cower under the coffee table. “Oh Ang, I’m sorry, baby – c’mon. Daddy’s sorry.”

Apologetically, Dustin explains “She told me and Erica not to tell you, because she didn’t wanna out Tommy to you even though she was pretty sure he wanted to fuck you. Then after your crisis, we agreed he wasn’t good enough for you.” Steve feels a sudden headache coming on, because this entire scenario has ‘Scoops Troop’ written all over it in big bold letters. “If it’s not Tommy Hall, then who?”

“Billy. Max’s Billy.”

There is a pause before Dustin asks “…is he okay now?”

The thing about Dust is that he’s so outwardly goofy that it’s easy to forget that he’s so smart, and he’s so smart that it’s easy to forget that he’s so empathetic. “Yeah, he’s okay now. He grew up a lot more when he went back to California.”

“Is he nice?” It’s less a question and more a demand.

“He’s really nice,” Steve says honestly, finally coaxing Angie back onto his lap after earning her forgiveness. “And he’s more…patient now. More relaxed. I think Lauren might be his best friend – he calls her Lulu, and I see him every morning when he drops her off. He um…he works for El.”

Jane Hopper is something of a…not exactly a sore spot for Dustin, but mentioning her tends to make him droop like a wilting daisy. They are not close and probably never will be. Steve used to think Dust was exaggerating when he said that Eleven didn’t like him, but she tends to shut down in one on one conversations with him, and she’ll do just about anything to avoid being left in a room alone with him.

Steve doesn’t really think that it’s because El straight up doesn’t like him, he thinks that it’s more of a matter of a sheltered person like El not quite knowing how to deal with a personality as loud and attention-grabbing as Dustin’s can be. That reaction crushes his self-confidence though, so the Scoops Troop try not to bring her up, and Steve tries to do El the courtesy of not overwhelming her too often.

“Oh good, Mike was just telling me she was getting busy enough to start needing help,” Dustin says neutrally. There was a pause, and then, more quietly, he asks “Is Max doing okay?”

It’s a little weird, because even though they’re all the same age, Max kind of had to grow up the fastest, because while the others were thinking about the end of their freshman year of college, Max was giving birth and dealing with a marriage and a mortgage. “I think she’s excited to have Billy back in town – he’s hinted that she was having a bit of financial trouble before he got here.”

“So, you don’t think that she and Justin will be getting back together?”

Steve sighs, irritated. “If Lucas wants to make me a spy, the least he could do is ask me the questions himself.”

“That’s not a yes,” Dust coaxes. “Just yes or no, I refused to ask you anything else.”

“No, I’m pretty much sure that if he comes back to town, Max will be asking to borrow the nail bat.”

“Hm, there’s a **_long_** line for that. Can you pick me up from the station?”

“Uh-huh. Eight o’lock on the 30th, right?”

“Right.” Dust sighs, and again Steve’s heart gives a painful pang at hearing how tired he sounds. “Sorry, it’s time for my study group. Love you, Steve.”

“Love ya, kid.”

\---

He has way more work to do now, since Robin insists that the original bet was for only a make-out session and he kind of ended up with a boyfriend, so she gleefully dumped upon him all of the quizzes she gave before the students began spring break, including the twenty page midterms she made them do. He didn’t have to grade the three page essays at the end but that still left seventeen pages to mark through forty-five times.

Despite the stack of paperwork in front of him, Steve’s still got a huge grin on his face as he sits across from Robin in the diner and lifts his coffee mug. Dazed, he says “I’ve got a boyfriend.”

He can’t say it too loud, that’s inviting trouble on himself that he doesn’t need, but he can’t hold it in.

Robin looks up, threads of hair escaping from her messy bun, and smirks at him, but her eyes are enormous and warm. “Yeah, you do.” Setting down her pen and flexing her fingers, Rob rests her chin on her hand. “And you still haven’t given me any details on dates number two and three.”

Steve’s brain helpfully provides him with the dreamy vision of both of these.

Date number two was a pool house in Evansville, drinking beer, talking trash at each other that was _at least_ half flirting, and finding reasons to brush up against Billy in public, until Billy stood behind him as he was making a shot and growled in his ear, “ _Get in the fuckin’ car, darlin’. Gonna bite you where you like it_.”

They steamed up the windows of the Impala that was the Camaro’s spiritual successor, and Billy pulled him on his lap, yanked opened the buttons on his shirt and assaulted Steve’s chest – pinched, kissed, sucked, and yes _bit_ him, until Steve had his hands braced on the roof to keep himself grounded in a world that kept spinning, and cried “ _Oh fuck, Billy, stop, I’m gonna come_.”

“ _Mm, I don’t hear a downside anywhere in there. Lemme get you off, heartbreaker.”_

Right there in the driver’s seat, Steve’s head thrown back and mouth wide open as he tugged frantically on Billy’s shortened hair, coming without a hand ever touching his dick because he had Billy’s groaning mouth sucking at his nipples. Limbs shaking, Steve shoved his hand down the front of his pants and jerked Billy off with sharp rotations of his wrist, kissing all over his face, his neck, his chest. “ _Baby, baby_ ,” he murmured, nipping at Billy’s neck. “ _Look at me_.”

Billy’s eyes were the blue of distant oceans, like he kept a part of California in him wherever he went. Steve whispered “ _Fuck, Billy, you’re beautiful_ ” and suddenly his fingers were soaked with come, Billy staring up at him in stunned rapture, like Steve was the sun and he couldn’t bring himself to look away.

Date three was Billy making California-style tacos for him (he had no idea that avocados were so delicious, what the hell!) and they watched _Stand By Me_ , the Friday night movie on tv, head on Billy’s shoulder while he explained how Stephen King basically ripped off The Party’s life story, minus Maxine and Eleven.

Billy looked so startled when Steve started groping him on the sofa. There were sometimes moments that Billy really seemed to think that Steve was some kind of stuck-up prude, when he looked absolutely flabbergasted that Steve was as into this as he was, could be as _aggressive_ as he was.

“ _Bed_?” Billy asked in his ear, grinding down against him, his hands squeezing Steve by the hips. Thick, throbbing against him, making Steve’s mouth water and his heart beat three times faster. His belly was wet with pre-come, smeared all over his skin, burning hot where their skin met. Frotting like desperate teenagers.

Steve had his teeth clenched together, trying not to shout so loudly that all his neighbors knew his guest’s name was Billy. He grabbed Billy by the upper arms and squeezed hard, sweating and arching his hips into his every motion, thighs tightened around his hips. “ _Billy, if you stop right now, I swear I’ll kill you_.”

“ _Yeah_?” The dummy was so surprised. “ _Getting close, heartbreaker_?”

Sometimes, Billy still seemed surprised that Steve even reacted to him, like he was an untouchable statue. _My ice princess_. But he was flesh and he was blood, and it scared him, how much he wanted Billy to touch him. How bewildered he felt at the sight of Billy lying next to him in the morning, face down in the pillow.

He’d show him a goddamn ice princess.

“ _Give it to me good, baby, c’mon,”_ he moaned, and Billy bucked faster, breathed harder. Steve could feel his arms shake and smiled against his mouth. Raking his nails down his back, Steve slid his hands beneath the back of Billy’s boxers and got two handfuls of his ass, rasping “ _That’s it, like you mean it. Fuck, don’t stop, Billy. Right there! Baby-baby-!”_

“Steve-o, earth to Steve-o!” Robin sing-songs. “What planet did you land on, dingus? Care to share with the class?”

He waves her off. “You don’t want to hear all the sweaty, manly details, Rob…”

She watches him drift off, pale skin flushing warm and vivid. “Oh my god, what’s that face for? What did you do?!”

Blushing like a schoolgirl, Steve hides his face. “After the boning, he made me hot chocolate and we spent three hours cuddling on the couch!”

“Oh my god, Steve, leave it to you to get embarrassed by the high school romance bits,” Robin is laughing at him, loud and happy. “What a dingus!”

Despite her laughter, Rob is practically glowing. Has Steve’s new relationship really made her this happy? With a bit of a whine to his tone, Steve says, “Well it’s not like I haven’t done the other parts before! I didn’t even know Billy _wanted_ to do the sappy shit!”

She clicked her tongue, grinning fondly. “You love it.”

“I do,” he admits, bashful. “He’s all…romantic and stuff. Y’know.”

“And stuff? Come on, you can give me better details than that.” Steve can’t manage to do anything but blush harder and Rob smiles like the Cheshire cat. “Oh, that good, huh? I bet he brings you breakfast in bed and calls you pet names.”

Steve is hiding a smile behind his fingers, a lost and awed expression in his eyes. “Heartbreaker.”

“Hm?”

“He calls me sweetheart, and darlin’, and-and _heartbreaker_.” Self-conscious with himself, Steve buries his head in his arms and moans, “Oh god, please don’t make me say anything else.”

“That’s ridiculous and I love it,” Robin replies, with an enormous grin.

“Buckley, why are you torturin’ my guy?” Neither of them heard Billy walk into the diner, but there he is – blue flannel, fleece-lined jacket, and heavy denim. Steve becomes a puddle in the booth and it must be obvious because Rob looks positively gleeful and Billy is starting to look smug and maybe a little besotted.

 _Fuck_.

\---

Billy knows that Robin must’ve been teasing him – Steve’s pretty face is all pink, even the tips of his ears are red. Buckley, on the other hand, is almost demonic with glee. Clearing his throat, Steve gives him such an adoring expression that it leaves Billy nearly breathless. “Hi there, Harrington.”

“What are you doing here?” Steve asks playfully, with a smile that veers dangerously close to naked flirtation.

He shrugs. “Lulu went to her friend Sam’s birthday party. Wanted to check on you, since you said the slave driver chained you to your paperwork.”

Buckley huffs. “I won that bet fair and square!”

Steve huffs back, with an endearing little pout. “I never agreed to it, you bully!” He throws Billy a look with those devastating eyes. “She’s going to abandon me to see a movie. Wanna keep me company?”

If anyone ever figures out how fucking easily he falls to that gaze, he’s a dead man. Aw shit. From Buckley’s face, she’s already figured that out. “Yeah, ‘course.”

Buckley rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, like getting to moon at your new boyfriend is such a hardship.”

“Rob!” Steve hisses, looking around nervously.

She scoffs, getting up from the opposite side so that Billy could take her place. She gives Billy sort of a challenging stare, and tosses her head. “If he didn’t wanna go public, he should’ve said no the first damn time, when you warned him.”

Maybe Billy’s answer would be different if his father were still alive. But he ain’t. “It ain’t that big a deal – just don’t wanna get Harrington into any shit.”

She pitches her voice so that it won’t carry. “You don’t get to take whatever you want in private and leave him out in the cold in public.”

He can’t even imagine how Old Billy would react to having a woman talk to him like this. But by the hardness in her eyes, he does know that even Old Billy wouldn’t have scared her. Robin Buckley has fought monsters far more disturbing than the one he used to be. She also, judging from the steel in her jaw, has seen people (men? women? both?) do this to Steve before. Take their physical pleasure from him in dark of night and then pretend they can’t see him in the light of day.

She looks ready to knock his teeth out if she doesn’t like his answer, and Billy can both understand that anger, and respect her desire to protect Steve from pain. “Down girl,” he murmurs, “I wouldn’t leave him out in the cold anywhere, never mind around these wolves.”

“Rob,” Steve says lowly. “Don’t give him a shovel speech. I can take care of myself.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” she responds, with a smile that’s equally sweet and poisonous. Billy’s opinion of her skyrockets. “Have fun, boys.”

Steve sighs at her retreating back, looking put upon for a moment before he smiles at Billy again. Flicking his hair out of his face, he pushes his glasses up his nose and admits, “I actually do have to work on these. Sorry.”

Billy steals his coffee mug. “Yeah, I kinda assumed that.” He pulls a dog-eared copy of _Red Dragon_ from his jacket pocket. “Don’t worry, I can keep myself entertained. Besides, I got somethin’ real pretty to look at.”

He throws in a wink just for good measure, just because he knows he’ll be well rewarded with another rosy blush coloring Steve’s cheeks.

It’s relaxing, sitting around like a normal couple, nobody giving a shit about the two of them sitting there. Understandably, he’s pretty surprised when something – or someone – touches his dick under the table.

His eyes immediately shoots up to Steve’s face as the arch of a socked foot presses into the fly of his jeans, rubbing gently against the rapidly thickening semi there. The question on his lips dies almost instantly. He hardly needs to ask if it’s an accident – Steve’s gaze is already fixed on Billy, biting down on the corner of his lip as he tries to hide the curve of a wicked smile, his eyes dark behind the frames of his glasses.

Billy’s mouth drops open slightly as Steve’s toes curls around the rigid line of cock, wedged painfully against his zipper. Steve makes a low noise, a satisfied kind of purring, at how quickly Billy goes from semi to fully hard. Gripping the edge of the table with one hand and squashing his book into an open position with the other, Billy croaks “ _Steve_.”

Oh so innocently with his angel-faced smile and his creamy rose blush, Steve says “What are you reading?”

Billy has to bite down a pained groan as Steve rubs him just a little harder. It’s torturous – there’s too many layers between them to get Billy off, which he suspects that Steve is well aware of, but it also feels so good that he doesn’t really want him to stop. Too late, he recalls Robin’s words about Steve in the 11th Hour. _He likes to flirt with danger. He’s addicted to risk_.

He honestly couldn’t think of anything riskier than Steve trying to bring him off in the middle of one of the town’s busiest attractions, only edged out by the churches and the bars. Billy stares at him helplessly, wide-eyed and voiceless with the force of his surging arousal. There is the hint of a command in his voice when Steve repeats, “What are you reading, Billy?”

“R-red-Red Dragon,” Billy responds hoarsely, fighting to stop himself from humping Steve like a fucking animal. He can’t stop himself from letting go of the table and sliding his hand under the cuffs of Steve’s slacks, wrapping his fingers around his ankle to keep him there.

Steve looks very pleased indeed and gives Billy’s dick another rub, finding his cockhead through his pants and flexing his toes right around it. “ _Steve_ ,” he says weakly. “Are you trying to give me a fetish?”

Surprised, he asks “Do you have one?”

“No, but-” He holds in a whine and hisses, “Keep touchin’ my dick like that, and I’m gonna start having inappropriate thoughts about your feet, sweetheart.”

Surprised and curious now, Steve presses harder. “Can you come this way?”

“I don’t-I don’t know.” Billy has to hold back another whine and quickly lets go of his book before he can start accidentally ripping out pages. “Why…why are you…?”

Shyly, which is very rich coming from someone in the middle of giving him a footjob in public, Steve says “Just trying to make you feel good. Can’t use my hands from all the way over here.”

Despite these words, his stare on Billy is hungry, and he can hear Steve panting softly through his words. The distant part of his mind that’s still rational wonders what it is that’s doing it for him – that Billy is kinda weirdly turned on by his feet, that Billy is somewhat at his mercy, or that anyone could catch them doing this. Or maybe it’s a little of all three.

Unable to take it any longer, Billy gently pulls Steve’s sock off, preferring to be able to touch warm skin, and cups the top of his foot against his dick. He strokes Steve’s ankle and rolls his hips as subtly as he can, swallowing a moan as Steve’s dark longing stare holds him captive.

“Dunno where you got an idea like this, heartbreaker,” Billy croaks.

“We can stop,” Steve suggests sweetly, pushing his heel against his aching balls and flexing his toes again. Watching Billy’s eyelashes flutter and the way the hand still on the table clenches and unclenches spastically. Steve nibbles his lower lip and lowers his voice to a suggestive, throaty husk, “Or you can just come for me.”

“ _Steve_.” He doesn’t know which is stronger, surprise or desperation or fear.

“Nobody’s watching,” he promises, still in that honey-sweet persuasive purr. He emphasizes this with an up and down rub against the denim seam and licks his lips with an obscene flick of the tongue.

Billy’s cock twitches hard, weeping pre-come into his boxers, and he knows that Steve can feel it because he’s losing the effort to hold in that wicked smile now. His tongue darts out again, like he can taste Billy in the air, and Steve squirms around like he’s trying to relieve the pressure on his own cock.

He sinks down in the booth and spreads this thighs apart, holding Steve against his prick with a little more pressure. He pleads “F-faster, darlin’. Just a little…”

Billy can feel the muscles and tendons in his ankle flexing and shifting as Steve immediately gives in, all coy teasing over as rubs at a pace clearly meant to bring Billy off even through the thick fabric. An echo from the past murmurs “ _Yeah, it’s me. Don’t cream your pants_.”

His lips form around a silent ‘fuck’, trying not to be extremely obvious when he bucks into the contact, choking off his noises to soft helpless whimpers. 

“Fuck, you are so hot,” Steve breathes in the present, nostrils flaring. He’s almost openly panting now and his eyes look nearly black.

Black holes that want to completely consume him. Billy bites down a scream and comes, wet and sticky, because beneath that angel-faced sweetness is a wicked, hungry smile. Just for Billy.

Lazily, Steve takes a twenty dollar bill from his jacket and slaps it down onto the sticky table. “Gimme my sock back,” he says, collecting all his papers and fondly stroking down Billy’s thigh before taking his foot back. “Do you like French silk pie?”

“Who doesn’t?” Billy says faintly, dazed.

“Good,” Steve says, all sugar and sweetness again. Billy’s fucking dizzy, man. “I made us one. Let’s go.”

“Don’t you want to…?” His eyes dart down to Steve’s lap.

“Already did,” and there’s a hint of that dark gleam again. “Watching you, baby.”

_Holy fucking shit._


End file.
